One-Shot Fleet
by Hieda no Akyuu
Summary: Story inspiration credited to Chinorwegia and the One Shot Collection. A collection of one-shot short stories. Requests are welcomed.
1. When The Winds Ceased

**Lately, I've been looking into other stories in the Kantai category. One of them was the One-Shot Collection by Chinorwegia.**

**I want to make this clear that collection of short stories is a blatant copy of the concept behind One-Shot Collection. While the content itself will not be the same, I've decided that I want to try my hand at short and fast one-shots, because I have some experimental story-telling styles that I want to try out.**

**Please don't take this as a display of one-up-manship over anything else. This is just my own little attempt at a story style that is also currently being done by another member of the Kantai FF community. The credit for the inspiration of this story goes to Chinorwegia and his/her original collection of stories in One-Shot Collection.**

**As stated, this will be a bit of an experimental story collection, so this story may not be updated as frequently as my other stories are. In addition, if mood whiplashes aren't your thing, don't read these short stories. But feel free to leave requests. The more specific, the better. I want to be able to expand my writing and become more of a flexible writer.  
**

**One final note: while A:PM4 and A:AFS seem to be related in some way, this is a standalone story with no relation to my own renditions of the Kantai universe. In this, I will attempt to keep as true to vanilla Kantai and history as possible.**

**Enjoy,**

**-Hieda no Akyuu**

* * *

Like black snow, the ashes fall.

The ripped thread and string of red and white stockings rub against the glass of the earth, soaking in its blue warmth, a warmth that, by this point, is greater than the warmth she feels inside.

The dances of the denizens. She'd never seen them dance so brightly, so happily, so joyfully. Did they always dance this way? Were they always so bright and cheerful? And if so, why is it only now that she notices?

Blinding, devastating - the colors of autumn ruthlessly carry on their ritualistic dances.

It's annoying.

Make it stop.

Make it stop.

Stop...

Her long, pale, straw-blonde hair, the color of young hay, ready to be reaped and harvested for the start of the new season. But what good is young hay when it's marred by the blemishes of the field? The black snowflakes, descending like angels, settle on her - her hair, her shoulders, her legs. They turn her into an eerie palette of colors - straw-mat yellow, micro-dot black, pale peach, stocking red, stocking white, linen blue.

The black angels embrace her with their remorseless love, a love so heavy and thick that she finds herself beginning to choke.

No, this is not love. This is the opposite of love.

But tell that to the black ashes, and they won't understand.

The denizens of the field dance are dancing even more furiously now. The fact that the star in the sky that is called the sun is being blocked out by the unrelenting sheets of gray now no longer matters, for the denizens of the field are fulfilling its role. They throw about their flourishes and joy like paint, and nothing escapes their sight.

She, who is in the middle of the field of denizens, is painted most of all.

She feels a tap against her left thigh. A hunk of twisted scrap metal, with two pipes incongruously jutting out from the top. She wants to feel sorry for it, apologize to it, but in the end, it's just another scrap of metal lying in the field of glass with her.

In fact, there's not really much difference between them. It's not like either of them had the same kind of energy that the denizens of the field have.

The glass is being tainted. Not just by the energetic paint of the dancing denizens, not just by the angels of black ash, but by the red life pouring from her, pouring down from openings in her body, openings that were forced open with conflict, exacerbated by hate, and left to rot by resentment and forlorn. She'd never seen her own life flood out from herself in this way.

It's so alarming that it's almost...

...breathtaking.

It's absurd. She knows she should feel afraid, she should feel scared, she should feel like she needs to do something to stop this.

But for some reason, she can't. In fact, it's more that she _knows _that she can't. So she doesn't even bother.

As she watches her own life seep into the glass to coat it forever from sky-blue to rose-red, she finally realizes what this red truly is. It's not just her life.

It's her hope.

No wonder she can't feel anything in particular right now.

If you have no hope, you have no reason to feel anything, because you don't have anything to look forward to.

Ah, now she understands.

Now she gets it...

...what it means to be...

..."hopeless"...

...that was what it was called, wasn't it?

This..."mission".

Whatever that means now.

Words have lost meaning.

Like cells being destroyed by having their membranes popped, words are being removed from her mind like a genocide. They're just a mass of useless, dead information floating around in the deep, dark abyss that she is letting her mind slowly develop into...no different than the slowly enlarging field of bright, cheerful, and ultimately useless denizens. Everything inside will rot like a pile of dead corpses, rot until there is nothing left but the bones.

The dogs will be here soon to collect the bones, too.

She looks down. Instead of gazing at herself in the mirror of the field of glass, she instead beholds another girl.

This girl was...this girl was...

...who was she again?

She's almost forgotten. But she knows she can't forget. She absolutely must not forget. It's okay to forget everything else, because nothing else matters. Only this one thing in front of her matters now.

She can't remember this girl's name. She can barely remember her own by now, after all. But names don't matter either.

She puts her trembling hands on the girl's shoulders and drags her up against her. The life that she's lost makes it tough, but it doesn't matter how much of it she's lost, she knows she'll still have it in her to do this much for this girl whose name she has forgotten.

This girl was someone she lived with.

Someone she played with.

Someone she had races with.

And won every time.

Someone she ate with.

Someone she took baths with.

Someone she fought with.

Both against, and with.

Someone she laughed with.

Someone she cried with.

Someone she slept with.

In both senses of the word.

Someone she was sisters with.

Someone she was friends with.

And someone who meant something more to her than anything else in the world.

So why is it only now that she wants to tell her all of this?

Why is it only now that she finally has the courage to admit everything?

Why now?

When she knows it's far too late?

No, no.

That shouldn't even be a question.

She knows why. She knows why she feels this way only now.

She's trying to make herself ignorant so that she has an excuse to feel sad and not have to feel regret.

She knows why. There's no reason to pretend like she doesn't know.

She clings onto the girl as tightly as she can. It's not much, but it'll keep the girl from slipping and breaking through the field of glass and shattering her world forever.

Then, the world changes on its own.

The field of glass is bombarded by trillions of falling boulders.

These boulders, while not exactly large by any means, have more than one way to exert their force.

They pound the field of glass, threatening to break it altogether. The denizens, however, don't care - they just continue to dance as frantically as ever.

These boulders also pelt her and the girl. It's a good thing that the girl can't feel the boulders, because they hurt.

Both as they hit her, and as they roll down her face and down her eyes onto the girl.

She feels the lapping jaws of the glass on which she sits biting at her waist. She hadn't noticed that the glass has already reached that high.

It's about that time, huh.

She pulls up the girl as high as she can, embracing her lips with the girl's.

But it's...just not the same.

It's just not the same.

It'll never be the same.

So all she can do is hold the girl, hug her for dear life, and wait for the field of glass to open up and swallow them.

If anything, she can take comfort in the fact that the two of them will go to sleep together, one final time, to a more peaceful, less complicated place.

In a place where hopefully, no one will ever wake them up again.


	2. A Lunar Night

**A/N:**

**It seems that my first entry was a bit too arbitrary to be understood easily. I apologize for a slightly confusing story.**

**The first story's synopsis was focused on Shimakaze and Amatsukaze after a devastating final battle in which they are the sole survivors. Amatsukaze, however, has already died, and Shimakaze is well on her way to join her too. The story was meant to capture Shimakaze's last thoughts before she, too, sank, but instead of describing the scene normally, I tried to replace as many of the elements of the scene with metaphoric details.  
**

**Stories like this that are not exactly written in the norm are what I aim to write. Therefore, they ****_can _****be a bit enigmatic and hard to understand at first, though that isn't to say that I won't write normal stories. Because of this, I'll be putting in story synopses like this for the more "experimental" chapters so that my intentions behind the stories can be more easily understood.**

**Thanks for reading,**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Yamato-san, what are you doing out here this late at night?"

"E-Eh? Fubuki-san? I...I should ask the same of you, should you not be asleep in the destroyers' dorm right now? It is very late, you know."

"Er, that's...what I said, wasn't it..."

"Ah..."

"..."

"..."

"U-Uh, um...so! Anyways! Um...l-like I was saying..."

"Oh, um, yes, of course. I-I...I wanted to come out tonight because tonight is a full moon. Look..."

"Ah, yes, you're right, it is a full moon tonight. It's really beautiful tonight."

"Indeed, it is really - "

"...Yamato-san? Are you o...kay...? Er, what's...what's wrong? Why is your face so red?"

"N-Nothing! Please, don't - don't mind me!"

"Are you sure, Yamato-san? If...if you're not feeling well, I can...I can help you to the infirmary..."

"No, I am fine, I insist! Um, please, have a seat with me, if you don't mind - it's - it is better to watch the moon together with a friend, they say!"

"Ah, o-of course! Um, if I might ask, how long have you been sitting here? Isn't it uncomfortable to be sitting at the edge of the dock like this?"

"Not at all. I've...done a lot of moongazing before. Though, this is the first time I have the opportunity to watch the moon with a friend."

"A f-friend..."

"Why, of course. Are we not friends?"

"N-N-N-N-No, I-I-I didn't mean it like that, Y-Yamato-san! I'm just - I'm just really happy that you called me your friend!"

"But...we have known each other for a while now. I thought...I was under the impression that we were already..."

"Th-That's true, but - but - but I didn't think that we were were already, er, friends, you know?"

"Aw...what...what makes you say that? Perhaps...perhaps my behavior towards you was poor? If that is the case - "

"N-No, it's not that either! I - I just didn't know that - unnnnggg..."

"Th-Then, p-please, don't worry about it! I, I don't want to make you uncomfortable..."

"..."

"..."

"U-Um, Yamato-san?"

"Yes?"

"Can - Can I ask you something?"

"Of course...what is it?"

"It's only been two weeks or so since you've come here to this base, right?"

"Indeed it has."

"How do you like it here?"

"It is...wonderful. The Admiral is very kind, he cares for us, and everyone is happy. There is nothing that I can say to complain."

"..."

"...Fubuki-san? Is there...something wrong?"

"No. I-I mean, yes, yes there is something wrong...!"

"Huh? Oh - did I say something that offended you? I'm - I'm very - "

"It's - it wasn't anything _offensive_, but - Yamato-san, you're lying, aren't you?"

"Lie? But - but why would I - "

"Yamato-san, please listen to me. Tonight - tonight isn't the first night that I've seen you come out to the dock like this to watch the moon. In fact, for the past week, every time I looked out here when I was heading to my dorm to sleep, I've seen you sitting here. I don't know how long you've been doing this, but - but nobody just comes out here and spends the night watching the moon while everyone else is asleep just because they want to...right?"

"..."

"Er...well...so I thought that since no one else seems to know about this, I thought - that I might come visit you once and ask you what's wrong. And...and besides, shouldn't - isn't it better to go moongazing with someone else? It's...a bit lonely to watch the moon like this by yourself, right?"

"..."

"..."

"...I'm very sorry, Fubuki-san...yes, you're right. I was lying to you. I'm sorry."

"Well - well, I don't...mind that, but...but that must mean there's something wrong, right? But - but if you don't want to talk about it, I can - I can just leave - "

"No, please, don't leave!"

"...Yamato-san?"

"Don't leave me, Fubuki-san. Instead - instead, will you stay awhile and listen to what I have to say?"

"Uh...yes, y-yes, of course."

"I...ever since I have arrived at this base, I...I have never been deployed. I have been waiting these past two weeks to participate in a sortie, an expedition, anything - but Admiral has never deployed me. I understand that I am expensive to deploy, and that I consume lots of resources by myself, but...but if I am not even sent out on a single mission, then - then what was the point of me coming to this base?"

"Ah..."

"And - and please don't misunderstand, I am not angry at Admiral for this. The reasons why I have not been deployed yet are understandable, and I can understand myself that currently, Admiral does not have very many resources to spare. But...still..."

"Um...Yamato-san?"

"Yes?"

"...I...I know how you feel."

"Oh...?"

"Um...I...I actually was the very first ship girl deployed to this base. A 'starter' ship girl, I was called."

"Oh...! You were the first one here? I see..."

"Ehehe, yes, I was. Um...at the very beginning, it was just the two of us, me and the Admiral. Over the weeks and months, Admiral sent me out on all sorts of missions, and during that time, I found more friends out at sea and made more friends who were constructed here at base. But...things began to change."

"Change? What do you mean...?"

"Well...as we got more and more ship girls joining and living with us here, Admiral...started to focus more on the other girls, especially the more...erm...'exotic' ship girls. I - I don't mean that in a derogatory way, it's just that Admiral spent a lot of time and resources trying to acquire them, so that's why I call them exotic - but Admiral began spending lots of time on the other girls like Urakaze-san, Kiyoshimo-san, Asashimo-san, Amatsukaze-san..."

"Oh..."

"When I first started noticing this, I began to feel upset, because...because at first, from the beginning, it was just me and Admiral. Admiral would always focus on me, give me lots of attention...I felt like I was becoming more and more distanced away from him, even though I'd done so much for him from the very beginning. In a sense, _I _was the one who...who helped him build up this base to be what it is now. No one else can say that but me..."

"..."

"And so, eventually...eventually I couldn't take it anymore. I met Admiral in his office when no one else was around and asked him why he was starting to ignore me all of a sudden. It was great that he was trying to give everyone attention, and I knew that I couldn't monopolize Admiral all to myself, but I was beginning to feel really resentful towards the other girls."

"And...and what did Admiral say?"

"He...erm...this is a bit embarrassing...but he apologized to me first and foremost. He said that he was sending me out on all these sorties not because he was solely focused on finding new ship girls whom we would pick up on our missions - well, he did admit that it was definitely something he was trying to go for - but the main reason for them was because he wanted to have me reach Level 99. That's why I was feeling like Admiral wasn't giving me any attention, because I was always away on sorties and missions, and because I was away, the other girls were able to get closer to him. He said that he was keeping his true intention a secret so that it would be the biggest surprise as it could be."

"A surprise? What kind of surprise?"

"Look, Yamato-san."

"...a ring? Ah, I have seen you wear this ring before. Did you receive that from Admiral?"

"Yeah. He...he married me, Yamato-san."

"M-Marry - ?! Oh, my goodness, con - congratulations, Fubuki-san!"

"Aha...thank you so much, Yamato-san..."

"How long - how long ago was this? When did he marry you?"

"Just a few days before you came, Yamato-san."

"Oh...I'm so sorry I wasn't able to attend..."

"It's fine, please don't worry about it."

"So everything has been resolved between you and Admiral, then?"

"Yes, it has. It turned out that Admiral wasn't chasing after the other girls but instead had his mind set on marrying me as soon as he was able all along. So...so please, Yamato-san, please trust him. Please trust Admiral - I'm sure he knows that he hasn't deployed you yet. Like you said, we are currently low on resources, so practically speaking, we can't deploy you very easily, but - but please wait a little bit longer. Now that I'm aware of this, I'll do everything that I can during my expeditions to bring back as many resources as I can so that you can finally sortie with us."

"Eh? N-No, Fubuki-san, please - you don't have to feel pressured to do anything in particular for me, I was just - "

"Yamato-san..."

"...yes?"

"Please, let me help you. If I don't, I'll start having trouble going to sleep...knowing that you're sitting out here all alone every single night."

"..."

"A-And, besides, I've gotten really good at going on expeditions now! Now that I'm married, too, my level cap's been increased a whole lot, so I'm the strongest destroyer here at base - or, at least, one of the strongest. If you want to have the chance to sortie, Yamato-san, please let me help you gain that chance. We all need to fight as a fleet, after all."

"...is this really alright, Fubuki-san...? For a battleship like me to rely on you...I shouldn't have to burden you like this..."

"It's not a burden, Yamato-san. Admiral taught me a long time ago when we first met that eventually, with enough time and effort, even a weak destroyer like me can shoulder any amount of burden. After all, I carried this whole base on my back at one point. So this isn't a burden at all, Yamato-san. In fact, this is motivation."

"..."

"Yamato...san? Eh, eh!? Yamato-san, you're crying! Oh no, handkerchief, handkerchief..."

"...thank you so much, Fubuki-san...this...oh dear me...this...isn't the kind of behavior I ought to be showing..."

"It's okay. Everyone has to cry at some point. I...I cried a lot before too, whenever I didn't complete a mission successfully or came back with heavy damage, but every single time, Admiral never yelled at me or scolded me. He always told me that I did a great job, and that he was glad that I came back to base safe."

"..."

"..."

"Fubuki-san?"

"Yes?"

"...if...if this isn't too much to ask...which it might be..."

"Yes, what is it?"

"...would you like to...watch the moon with me like this every night until the day I can finally sortie?"

"...um..."

"I-It is fine if that's too much! I - oh no, I...I shouldn't have said this..."

"Yeah, Yamato-san, I'd love to."

"...erm...you will? You really will?"

"Yeah. You know, Admiral and I...we used to sit out here at the docks like to to watch the moon too on the weekends, but that was a long time ago, before there were many of us here at base. We stopped doing so since the amount of work Admiral has to do now has gotten to the point where he can't spend as much time with me as he'd like. So he told me that if I could find a replacement for him so that I could continue to enjoy moongazing, both for myself and for his sake, that would be perfect."

"...ah..."

"I'll bring something to drink next time. But no alcohol, though."

"Oh...thank you, Fubuki-san."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"Fubuki-san?"

"Yes, Yamato-san?"

"The moon..."

"...what about the moon?"

"...it is beautiful tonight. Truly beautiful."

"Ah...yes, it really is."

"...erm..."

"...?"

"...especially because...I'm watching it...with...you..."

"..."

"..."

"...thank you, Yamato-san, but...I...erm...I already have Admiral..."

"...ah...oh...uuuuuuuu...I'm...I'm sorry...! ! ! !"

"D-Don't worry about it, Yamato-san! There's - there's no need to hide your face, really! I - I really appreciate it!"

"...now I probably seem like such a scandalous woman...I shall never marry..."

"There's no need to go _that _far...! But anyway, I don't - I don't mind being your friend, Yamato-san."

"...thank you, Fubuki-san. Thank you so much..."

"I hope we sortie together soon, Yamato-san."

"I hope so, too."


	3. The Last Order

**A/N:**

**One of the few things that I pride myself on about being a writer is the dialogue that I put into my stories, because one of the gripes that I have with anime and other shows, subbed or dubbed, is that the conversations rarely ever feel smooth or natural; they always seem somewhat forced all the time, like it's too obvious to tell that the voice actors are reading off a script. Therefore, I've always made it a personal goal of mine to produce dialogue that's believable, dialogue that sounds exactly like what a normal, every-day conversation would sound like.**

**Thus, the second entry was more straightforward this time, but it focused solely on the dialogue. The intent behind "A Lunar Night" was to have the readers imagine the scene for themselves as much as possible using only sensory details provided in the dialogue to build and capture the scene. While writing has its clear limitations, its one advantage over other entertainment mediums like film and anime is the ability to provide natural narration, but by removing this one advantage, you're basically left with what's essentially a script, like a movie script. Therefore, by writing this way, the dialogue itself must be rich enough to make a scene easily imaginable to the point where a narration isn't needed at all. Hopefully I was able to do what I aimed for.**

**I guess this story's becoming a sort of personal thought process for me as I continue to experiment with different ways to write. I wonder if this's against Fanfiction R&amp;G. Hopefully it isn't.  
**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Mamiya, Irako, are you alright?"

The naval base has been attacked. At 1729 hours, just as Akatsuki and her ship sisters Hibiki, Ikazuchi, and Inazuma were heading inside Mamiya's cafe to enjoy their traditional afternoon treats of sherbet parfaits and creme brulee, a large squadron of Abyssal vessels had found and assaulted the naval base, catching the base completely unawares. Because of this surprise attack, none of the ship girls at base could be deployed fast enough to defend the base, so all they could do was dig in and wait for the attack to cease, hoping that whatever they were hiding behind during the raid would hold up long enough to prevent a bomb from dropping right on top of their heads.

Nagato, having been invited by Akatsuki to join them while heading back to the docks from the Admiral's office, therefore was trapped inside the cafe with Akatsuki and her destroyer sisters and the two supply ship girls. Tossing aside the heavy classical painting of a fruit decoration on a table that she had ripped off the wall in her haste and used as a shield to cover herself and the others, Nagato looks at her arms, annoyed at the small cuts all over her arms. The cafe had taken a bomb explosion just outside the front entrance, blasting the windows in and sending glass shards of all kinds showering through. Nagato's arms were the biggest parts of her body exposed to this glass shower due to the way Nagato was holding the heavy painting, so now her arms are filled with small cuts that feed blood like tributaries of a large river system pooling blood and delivering it down to her elbows.

"Y-Yes, we're alright!"

Mamiya's frightened voice that is trying to keep calm despite the shock of the unexpected air raid reaches up to Nagato.

"Girls, are any of you hurt? Tell us now, because if you are - "

"N-N-No, Mamiya-san, we - we aren't hurt!"

"Yeah, thanks to Nagato-san, we aren't scratched one bit. She might need some first aid, though."

"My goodness, you're right! Nagato-san, please, wait here while I - "

Nagato shakes her head. Being the secretary ship girl of the base for a very long time, Nagato wields a certain air of authority about her that puts her virtually on par with the authority of the Admiral. It was an unspoken rule: when Nagato spoke, everyone listened. Speaking over her was simply not an option - not even the carriers or the supply ship girls dared to have the courage to break this unspoken rule. The fact that Nagato can simply shake her head and make no noise and still demand an obedient audience is proof of this.

"These wounds are negligible. For now, I am assuming on-scene command. You girls, defend Mamiya-san and Irako-san in case there are follow-up airstrikes. If there are none, look around and make sure our comrades are safe. I shall head to the Admiral's office and confirm his condition."

The bomb that shattered the windows also caused some of the support beams to collapse, caving in the low-lying roof on the right corner of the front of the cafe. Nagato's boots crush large splinters of wood, frighteningly grotesque chunks of glass, and shattered silverware as she hurries outside, not bothering to duck underneath the top of the door because it is too low for her and simply smashing her fist through it instead.

Fires run amok, blazing atop tiles and roofs of the various buildings of the naval base. The enemy aircraft, thankfully, had not used any incendiary bombs in the raid, it seems, judging from the relatively low number of fires, all things considered. The ship girls throughout the base, sensing that the air raid has stopped, are rushing about, shouting orders at each other to coordinate a frantic yet controlled operation of firefighting and salvaging.

"Yuubari, there's a fire hose inside the workshop! Bring that over, we need it right now!"

"We need more buckets over here!"

"Everyone, get away from that storage building, it's going to collapse from the fire!"

"Tch...I'm gonna make all those Abyssal idiots sink to the bottom of the ocean for what they did to my picture of me and Kitakami-san!"

Nagato can't help but wonder to herself why a ruined picture is a top priority in a situation like this as she cuts behind the storage buildings and workshops straight for the schoolhouse and track field. The track field was not targeted by the air raid, but the schoolhouse took a few bombs, and the north wing is on fire. Beyond the schoolhouse, however, is the main logistics building, in which the Admiral's main office is located. If she knows her Admiral well, he should be there. The problem right now is that judging by the small amount of smoke coming from beyond the schoolhouse, it appears that the logistics building, too, is on fire, though the fire shouldn't be raging out of control just yet.

Nagato grimaces. As much as she wishes to assist everyone else, to put the power of the Big Seven into good use, she is more determined to check on the Admiral. The Admiral first - first and foremost.

Before all else.

"Nagato-nee! _Nagato-nee!"_

A familiar cry grabs Nagato's attention, causing her to stop abruptly and kick up a small cloud of dirt on the outermost lane of the track field and turn towards the direction of her name being called.

"Mutsu!"

"Nagato-nee, this is bad. The Admiral - "

"Where is he? I'm on my way to check on him. Did anything happen to him?"

"He's - he was with me, Fubuki-chan, and Mutsuki-chan right when the air raid hit. He told us to get everyone to cover while he - while he - "

"While he what? Tell me, Mutsu!"

" - while he ran back to the office!"

Nagato's blood pulses cold as she feels her own breath freeze inside her lungs.

"He said - he said that he needed to do something before - "

_**"THAT IDIOT!"**_

Mutsu's words get caught on her tongue abruptly, and this allows Nagato the chance to tear herself away from her beloved young ship sister.

"N-Nagato-nee! Where are you - !? Oh, goddamn it, Nagato-nee!"

Stupid Admiral. Valiant, but stupid. Naively stupid. Why the hell did he run _back _to the offices, _in the middle of an air raid?_ And did he even reach it in time? He never thinks about himself. He always thinks about others. There's no point to his altruism if he can't live past twelve months of his post here at the naval base.

Nagato's loathing thoughts dulls out the world around her. She begins to fail to notice the suffocating thumps of her large, heavy boots and those of her sister's following closely behind, the crackling of fires growing more and more ravenous, the falling of wood, glass, and debris -

She's worked so hard for him. She was one of his very first battleships - his very first one, in fact. All this time, all these months of sortieing, fighting, and finally becoming his secretary ship - and he still thinks that tossing his own life away like a sakura blossom falling in the spring is completely acceptable.

The main doors that are in her way almost get shoved off their hinges as Nagato pushes them open without bothering to control her power, but she doesn't care. The tapping of military drums, chants of Banzai'ing Japanese soldiers, the military orchestral music...

_"This is a holy war! Give your lives for the glory of Japan! Give your lives in the name of the Emperor!"_

Nagato rips away the door to the Admiral's office with much more excessive force than is needed, and the door that is stuck because of a few collapsed bookcases on the other side gets launched backwards and stabs into the wall, hanging there as Nagato kicks the heavy bookcases out of the way.

_**"Admiral! Admiral, are you here!?"**_

Mutsu enters the Admiral's room after her to inspect the damage.

A bomb has torn open the room, exposing it to the air. Small fires are using what's left of the curtains on the jagged, ripped walls as fuel to burn in their respective corners. Papers, broken and unbroken bottles of ink, spare quills, wood splinters, glass shards, books, and embers lie scattered like wild confetti. The desk that the Admiral has sat in for twelve months has been blown apart into two halves, split down the middle, and the two halves have fallen forward, unmoving, letting the fire from the curtains lap at its feet.

"...he isn't here. Where did he go?"

Nagato barely hears Mutsu talk as she kneels down to pick up the scattered papers in front of the collapsed, broken desk. The afternoon sea breeze flows in liberally through the giant, gaping hole breached through the room, now that there are no walls to stop it. It flutters the papers about and fans the flames, causing them to grow restless and energetic with the fresh infusion of oxygen.

"I'll check the other rooms to make sure he really isn't here."

Nagato barely hears Mutsu's clomping exit the room and thump away, echoing through the second floor corridor. Rummaging through the papers, she determines the papers useless and tossing them aside with frustration, and the papers go sailing towards the other end of the room behind her. She looks down again, and underneath the small stack of messily scattered papers lies a small black notebook.

That's the Admiral's command book. It shouldn't be outside of the desk drawer at this time. If it really wasn't, it'd still be inside the drawer of the desk, and the drawers haven't been tossed around and still remain inside the desk.

Nagato kneels down quickly again, sliding the papers that are in the way aside to reveal the rest of the black notebook - but also a small black case that looks like it could sit neatly on her palm. Picking both of these items up with her huge hands, she holds the small black case curled up inside her right ring and pinky fingers against her palm, dabs the tips of her middle and index fingers with her tongue, and opens the command book to flip the pages to the last entry.

Remodel Fubuki directly to Kai Two. Don't worry about the resources. The fairies will be mad at me because I'd done this already for Yuudachi, but this time they'll let this slide.

After rebuilding the base and consolidating the fleet, Nagato is to lead the fleet against the main base of the Abyssal fleet. I've realized with this air raid that our suspicions have been confirmed. Push the Abyssals out of their base and reclaim that territory.

Finally, give this case to Nagato. She will need it for this mission.

Tell her that I'm sorry in advance.

No, this can't be.

Nagato's fingers subconsciously press down harder on the small case, but she closes the command notebook and pushes the small black case into the center of her upright right palm. Tucking the notebook underneath her left arm, Nagato opens the case.

A black and gold ring, adorned with the imperial crest of the former Imperial Japanese Empire, resting on the small pink cushion inside.

Nagato feels as though this was somewhat planned all along - just the execution didn't go as planned for the Admiral.

She doesn't know whether to feel happy or angry.

Probably both.

The crash of falling wooden planks behind her in the room throws her back into the burning reality of the room. Pulling the ring out of the case, Nagato quickly pockets the case in her skirt and slips the ring onto her right ring finger.

To her surprise, the ring squeezes lightly and secures itself tightly over the edge of Nagato's black fingerless elbow glove. The metal of the ring feels surprisingly cold, even though the skin of ship girls are more desensitized and more resistant to extreme temperature changes, but it only takes a second for the warmth from Nagato's finger to permeate through the metal. The imperial crest glows pink, the color of sakura petals at full bloom.

It's too bad that the only sakura petals floating about inside the room are not flower petals, but the embers of fire.

"Nagato, the Admiral isn't here, he must be missing. But I don't understand how, or where he's gone off to...do you know if he's been here during the air raid?"

Nagato slowly turns her head to glance at Mutsu over her shoulder. She sees not fright, but a willingness to work in her younger ship sister's face. This is what the base needs to carry out the Admiral's last orders.

"He has been here. His orders are written here, but we need to secure this base first. Let's get outside and help the others fight the fires and make sure that more enemy air waves don't approach."

"Eh? Well - wait, what about the Admiral?"

"Mutsu, trust me. I know the Admiral better than anyone else here. This is what he wants. For now, we must report him as missing in action. But for right now, we have bigger issues at hand. Now go!"

"Er - well, okay, but - but what about you, Nagato-nee?"

"I have some business to attend to first in this office."

Mutsu gazes at Nagato's back, at the silhouette of the one figure at this base who symbolized the unwavering confidence and hope that formed the foundation of the fleet's morale.

After all, the power of the Big Seven isn't just for show, is it?

"Okay. Don't stay here too long...it's dangerous to play around with fire, after all."

Mutsu's boots clomp away, echoing again down the stairs, isolating Nagato inside the Admiral's room.

The cool embrace of the ocean breeze brushing her long, supple hair back behind her arms.

The touch of the light, smooth texture of the papers floating about and brushing against her shins.

The kiss of the embers on her lips, gliding up from the small fires that are biting at the feet of the Admiral's broken desk.

Instead of the tapping of military drums, chants of Banzai'ing Japanese soldiers, the military orchestral music, these are what she feels and hears and sees.

It's time to make a new memory.

Nagato raises her ringed hand and softly brushes the imperial crest with her lips.

She can almost taste the fleeting softness of the cherry blossom petal.

"I love you, Admiral."


	4. Firebirds 1

**A/N:**

**As requested, the third entry was based off one of the pivotal episodes of the anime. However, I put my own twist to it in order to meet the request's criteria.**

**Not much to mention here, since the story style wasn't necessarily experimental. However, I did try to put in as much ambient detail as possible. That, and you may have noticed that the dialogues had no modifying phrases like "Mutsu said" or "Nagato said". This was intentional in order to focus the story on the scene and break down story's sense of identity to the reader so that the story feels more intuitive and less like a story being read on the Internet.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Ehhhhhhhh?! We're - we're - we're - "

Shigure can hardly believe what she's hearing. Standing with Fusou, Yamashirou, Mogami, Michishio, Asagumo, and Yamagumo in the Admiral's office, the destroyer blinks, half horrified and half amazed, at the bespectacled young Admiral, who pulls off his naval cap and scratches the side of his obnoxiously blonde-dyed short hair. The top of his head, though, betrays the dark brown roots.

"Yeah, it was a real short notice; they didn't even tell me about it either until like, fifteen minutes ago," the Admiral sighs frustratedly. "Goddamn HQ...they could've at least let us know a day beforehand..."

"But I thought this program was only limited to Japanese nationality, sir!" Yamashirou protests. "Since when was this authoriz - "

"Is this some kind'a sick joke?!" Michishio bellows over Yamashirou, drowning her voice out. "Why do we have to sortie alongside an _American _ship girl? Honestly, this's gonna be so damn annoying!"

"Alright, you girls, just - just calm down there for a second," the Admiral slaps his naval cap back on his head and stands up out of his chair. "I know this's gonna be really awkward for everyone involved, but I've gotta ask you all to just put everything that's happened in the past behind you. After all, she's gonna be a visiting ship girl, and we need to be hospitable. Even if you find that you can't get along, she'll only be here for a week before she gets transferred to Okinawa."

"Admiral, you have not yet answered my question," Yamashirou presses, irritated at Michishio's rude interruption. "Since when was this authorized? And by whom?"

The Admiral sighs heavily and raises his hands in a half-shrug, palms up.

"Hey, listen, Yamashirou, those're some hard questions to be asking me since I don't know the full answers to them. All I know is that construction of American ship girls was authorized quite some time ago - I don't know how long ago, so don't ask - and the authorization was granted by the Emperor himself."

Yamashirou reacts with a forward step and a thrust of her index finger, nearly jabbing the Admiral right in left eye.

"Utter ridiculousness! The exalted Emperor would never authorize such a thing! He - "

"Like it or not, Yamashirou, that's what I've been told, so please don't shoot the messenger," the Admiral says exasperatedly. "And might I remind you that these times nowadays are not like the times of the past, during the war. Japan is not an enemy of the United States of America any longer. In fact, they have offered to expend much of their own resources and time to build their own ship girl fleet like we have to assist in the conflict against the Abyssals. It's not like we helped them build their fleet, all I know is that they were given the basic know-how of the ship girl design, and they took it from there, apparently. Believe whatever you want; your opinion won't change the fact that very soon, an American ship girl's gonna be escorted to our base to stay the week, sorry to say."

"Can't we, like, use her as target practice as she comes into the pier?" Asagumo rolls her eyes. "Yamagumo, don't you think so too?"

"Er...that's...that's taking it a bit too far..." Yamagumo chuckles awkwardly, not knowing whether to laugh at that or not. "We - we're no longer enemies, so there isn't any reason to feel any animosity towards the new American ship girl...I don't think..."

The office door then gets shoved open, and in come the four Akatsuki-Class destroyers, Akatsuki, Hibiki, Ikazuchi, and Inazuma.

"Commandeeeeeeeeeeer!" Ikazuchi call shrilly, "the new girl's here! She's here, she's here!"

"Hawawa, Ikazuchi-chan, don't scream so loudly, we're i-indoors, nanodesu!" Inazuma quickly lunges forward and hugs Ikazuchi from behind, covering Ikazuchi's mouth with her hands.

"Well then, let's go out and welcome her," the Admiral sighs, lifting his ceremonial katana off its rack bolted onto the wall behind him. He straps the beautifully inscribed scabbard, painted with lines from medieval Japanese poetry and decorated with lush sakura petals, to his belt.

"A-Admiral, that's - !" Shigure exclaims, watching the Admiral wear his sword.

"Admiral, a-are you sure you wish to do that?" Fusou asks worriedly. "Even if she is our guest, this new ship girl is still a foreigner. Wearing your sword is - "

"If she's a comrade, she deserves all the respect I can give," the Admiral says staunchly, frowning. "And might I add that apparently, this American ship girl has sailed here all the way from Pearl Harbor without any stoppage or rest. I'm sure she's very tired right now. C'mon, let's go out and greet her."

The Admiral walks out of his office and out to the harbor, flanked closely by this ship girls, including the Akatsuki sisters. As they head outside of the administrative building and out to the main harbor, the Admiral glances at his side at his secretary ship girl, Shigure, whose hair flaps are pressed down by themselves and whose hands are clasped together near her waist.

"Nervous, Shigure?" the Admiral asks.

Shigure nods the smallest nod the Admiral's ever seen her make.

"How so?"

Shigure doesn't answer.

"Well, if you don't wanna say, that's fine too..."

They reach the main harbor and stand above one of the piers that reaches down to water level. As it is low tide today, the pier is not engulfed by the water and can be accessed. They can see the telltale figures out in the water making their way towards the harbor.

"Admiral..."

The Admiral glances back down at Shigure again. A tense, apprehensive look is scrawled all over her complexion, but then again, that's how the rest of the ship girls more or less look, with the exception of the more cheerful Akatsuki-Class destroyers.

"...do you think we can get along with her?" Shigure asks quietly.

"There's no reason not to," the Admiral says simply. "Why, do you think she might be a bit mean? I'll scold her if she doesn't treat you nicely."

"No...that's..."

"Then what?"

"...I'm...I'm afraid that I'll be the one...who can't treat her well..."

"You, the one who - " the Admiral pauses, processing her words. "Don't worry, Shigure. I believe in you. You're a good girl. You'll find it in you to be friends with her."

"Are you sure, Admiral?"

Smiling, the Admiral turns to Shigure and puts both hands on Shigure's head. Like petting a dog, the Admiral rubs Shigure's hair flaps with his thumbs, pressing the sides of his thumbs and rubbing the hair flaps against the base of his index fingers. Wincing at first but closing her eyes and whining softly just like a dog, Shigure lets her Admiral rub her cheeks gently.

"If you can let me do this, then you can get along with the American girl ship," the Admiral says confidently. "It's nothing to worry about."

"Hey, hey, Admiral, now isn't the time to be all mushy 'n stuff with Shigure-chan," Mogami says irritably, stabbing her sharp fingernail into the Admiral's lower back and making him jump.

"Ahooooyyyy! Aye, I see you fine ladies on the pier!"

A milky-smooth Southern New Jersey accented Japanese voice rolls with the waves into the front docks of the Yokosuka Naval Base. As the ship girls lined up along the harbor near the pier watch, the newcomer slides across the calm seawater in the middle of the bright spring day with an aggressively big, toothy grin.

"Finally! After all those hours 'a sailin', I can finally take a goddamn break! Hooooooooooooo-_ah!_" the American ship girl yells with relief and delight at the prospect of finally docking ashore after a few days of nonstop cruising, and as soon as she brakes to a stop next to the pier, she angles her two triple-barreled six-inch/15.2cm (47cal) turrets straight up into the sky and unleashes two quick bursts of flame that jet up into the air and plume like fireflowers. Her eyes, too, fire up quite literally, and fiery red hazes sizzle from her eyes and blaze into the air momentarily. The ship girls flinch at the vulgar display of power, while the Admiral simply closes his eyes to ward against the heat from the flamethrowers and smiles awkwardly. Having met this American ship girl at the rendezvous point about twenty nautical miles from Yokosuka Naval Base, the girl's escort ships, Yuudachi, Murasame, and Shiratsuyu catch up to the newcomer.

"Awww, c'mon, you could've at least let us catch up, poi!" Yuudachi cries. "And you promised you'd race us here, too!"

"Well, it's not like you woulda won, I'm just better built than you!" the American ship girl laughs almost haughtily. "But if you're still up fer it, I'm down anytime!"

Yuudachi growls angrily. "Then let's race, right now! I can almost keep up with Shimakaze-chan, so there's no way I'll lose to you!"

"Hey, hey, girls, settle down, now's not the time to be racing," the Admiral calls out, getting their attention. "Anyhow, welcome to Yokosuka Naval Base. I'm the commanding Admiral here, Rear Admiral Nishimura Shinji. You are the U.S.S. _Phoenix_, I presume?"

Phoenix flicks her head backwards, tussling her long, feathery, creamy vanilla white hair with a black hair ribbon pinned on the back, a brilliant mane of hair that could easily be imagined as the wings of the mythological bird that gives her the name. Standing in at five foot eleven, Phoenix wears a short-sleeved World War II-era American naval officer's brown light leather service jacket and a curious Chinese qipao-style skirt with white inlets that fully and proudly exposes the healthy, supple, and squishy-looking thighs and legs. The rear flap of her qipao skirt are tethered with five sentient spearheads the size of obsidian blades and painted an ornate red and black, sharpened like the warlike talons of the phoenix, and these small spear heads float around the American ship girl, darting to and fro, as though taking a good look at the Japanese ship girls. Her fiery eyes are like the smoldering charcoals of a recently smothered fire, ready to reignite at any second's notice, and they emit such a sharp, piercing, blazing glare that it almost seems like anything those eyes look at could spontaneously burst into flame. The ends of her 47 caliber naval guns are quietly spitting out flamethrower exhaust, and Phoenix holsters the M2-A1 Flamethrower onto her belt on her right hip as she steps onto the pier.

"Yessir! Light Cruiser, U.S.S. Phoenix, has arrived to Yokosuka Naval Station!" Phoenix declares proudly. "I have returned!"

The Admiral frowns. "Re...turn...? Er..."

"Aw, never mind the small details, Admiral!" Phoenix laughs loudly as she climbs the stairs up the pier to meet Admiral Nishimura. As the Admiral walks forward to salute Phoenix, the American ship girl snaps to a solid naval salute.

"U.S.S. Phoenix is now at your command, Admiral Nishimura," Phoenix grins with a kind of aggressive smile that never seems to fade completely away from her facade. "I'll be in yer care, yeah?"

The other ship girls, including the ones who escorted Phoenix to Yokosuka Naval Base and are now climbing up the pier, peer at Phoenix - some with eyes of interest, some with eyes of distrust and wariness.

"I'm sure you're very tired from your voyage," the Admiral says, who finds himself an inch shorter than Phoenix, who takes a step closer to him. "We've already made arrangements to - "

Phoenix, without warning, places her hands on the Admiral's cheeks and forward his face slightly upwards to stare into her eyes.

"Mmmm...you seem familiar, yeah?" Phoenix murmurs, almost seductively, as the Admiral freezes up, his eyes captivated by Phoenix's mesmerizingly fiery gaze. Ignoring the Japanese ship girls, who cry foul play at her sudden behavior, Phoenix smirks subtly. "You're not _the _Admiral Nishimura, are you...?"

"Admiral!" Yamashirou screams, her white headband flapping with the ocean breeze. "Get away from that vile woman, she - "

"Stand owndown, Yamashirou, she's not dangerous!" the Admiral yells, but he's unable to tear his eyes away from Phoenix's captivating eyes. "Obviously I am not _the _Admiral Nishimura, Phoenix. That's impossible."

"Then lemme ask that in another way. You're not _one of _Admiral Nishimura's, are you...?"

Admiral Nishimura narrows his eyes, a sense of resentment seeping into his blood.

"And what if I am? What will you do, Phoenix? Sink my ships again?" the Admiral says in such a low voice that only Phoenix can hear him, thanks to the cover of the wind. "This is not Surigao Strait; this is the Yokosuka Naval Base. There is no reason to open old wounds. While you may be our guest, I expect you to behave while you are here. We are no longer enemies and thus do not need to act as such."

Phoenix grins even wider.

"Talkin' tough already, huh? That's good. We need more officers with backbone like ya," Phoenix bares her fanged, talon-like teeth in a dangerous smile as she slowly slides her hands off Admiral Nishimura's cheeks, one after the other. "But yer right, Admiral. Ain't no reason to be diggin' up our graves from the past, and I'm fine with that. But I'm not so sure if these ones over here can manage the same..."

Phoenix glances with a coy but malicious-looking smile at the Admiral's ship girls. The Akatsuki-Class destroyers, Murasame, and Shiratsuyu are looking on with stunned apprehension, while the rest of them eye Phoenix with varying degrees of distrust. Yamashirou and Shigure, by far, are the two ship girls who are giving Phoenix murderous looks, as though they're ready to pounce on her at any moment and tear her to shreds with their bare hands.

"You can relax while you're here," the Admiral says calmly, straightening up and clearing his throat. "That is a responsibility that is entitled to me alone, not you. And I'd like to remind you that physical contact with your superior officers is strictly not allowed in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. Perhaps you act this way towards your American superiors, but I will not tolerate a second time of this."

Phoenix just laughs again. "Awww, what, we can't be friendly around these parts? Shucks, that's a darn shame, in'nit? But fine, if that's how things're done here, I guess I'll just hafta follow protocol, don't I?"

The American light cruiser scans the faces of the Japanese ship girls surrounding her, and when her eyes fall upon Hibiki, she yelps out in delight.

"Hey, you! You're Hibiki, ain't'cha?" Phoenix asks with an almost disturbing switch of personality from aggressive seductiveness to an excited cheerfulness, hurrying over in front of Hibiki and bending her knees sightly.

"E-Eh? Uh - uh, yeah, I-I'm...I'm Hibiki..." Hibiki, taken back by the sudden attention of Phoenix, takes a cautious step backwards, and her three other ship sisters yelp at Phoenix's approach and hug Hibiki to protect her from the big scary American light cruiser. Ikazuchi steps in front of Hibiki and spreads her arms eagle-wide to stop Phoenix.

"D-D-Don't hurt Hibiki-chan!" Ikazuchi stammers, but she tenses up and whimpers as Phoenix smiles cheerfully down at her.

"Awww, but I jus' wanna meet a girl who's like me!" Phoenix says. "Up we go!"

Simply using her height to reach over the girls, Phoenix picks up Hibiki by putting her hands underneath her arms and armpits and lifting her up out of the reach of Inazuma and Akatsuki.

"H-Hey, put Hibiki-chan down right now!" Akatsuki yells. "You ought to do what a lady tells you to do!"

"A lady? Hmmm, drink some more milk and wait a few years, then we can talk," Phoenix smiles graciously at Akatsuki before focusing her attention on the frightened Hibiki that she's holding up in the air. "Now, _you, _on the other hand..."

"Phoenix, if you do anything to Hibiki..." the Admiral says in a threatening voice.

"Shucks, Admiral, relaaaaaaax, I'm not tryin'a mess with her 'r anythin'!" Phoenix drawls. "So, Hibiki. Where're your wings? Where's your fire?"

Hibiki blinks down at Phoenix.

"Huh...? Um...uh...I don't...I don't know - "

"Oh, c'mon, you're a phoenix like me, right? We've come back! Show me what you can do! I've sailed all this way to come see you, and you don't know what I'm talkin' about?"

Hibiki just doesn't know what to say, so she just keeps quiet. Sighing with a sad smile, Phoenix sets Hibiki down and backs up a few steps.

"I mean this, Hibiki. You can't be a phoenix for no reason! Surely they built'cha with somethin' like this!"

Phoenix's spearhead talons snap up and spontaneously pop into burning balls of fire.

"Or somethin' like this?"

Raising her right hand, Phoenix pumps it into a fist, and her right fist bursts into a brilliant flame. Hibiki, who was captivated by Phoenix's flamethrower fanfare earlier, stares into the fires in almost trance-like wonder.

"H-Hey, you're scaring Hibiki-chan, Phoenix!" Asagumo yells, trying to get Phoenix to stop, but Phoenix just ignores her.

"Well? Where's your phoenix flame, Hibiki? Don't tell me I've come all this way jus' to find out that the one girl who shares my name in this fleet can't pull this off?" Phoenix asks, her voice becoming steadily more let down and disappointed. Hibiki senses this and hangs her head, shaking it a bit downheartedly.

"I...I can't..." she mumbles. "I don't...have anything like that..."

Phoenix twists her lip, clearly disappointed, but she then takes a step forward with her burning right hand and clasps Hibiki's own right hand with it.

"O-Ow!?" Hibiki yelps in shock and surprise as Phoenix's hand presses firmly against her hand and holds it. At this, the ship girls react: Yuudachi and Shigure, the girls with the fastest reactions, dash at Phoenix; Yuudachi dashes in low to elbow Phoenix in the hip, while Shigure gets a sprinting start and hops in the air, aiming her right foot at Phoenix's head and neck region. Phoenix senses this and quickly backdashes to avoid the destroyers, and Yuudachi, having gone too fast, accidentally crashes into Michishio and topples over with her onto the harbor. But Phoenix hears the clanking of cannon nearby, and she looks up to see both Fusou and Yamashirou, having deployed their ship armaments, confront her with their fully loaded triple-barreled 41cm cannons.

"I knew we should never have trusted you!" Yamashirou seethes, so very tempted to waste Phoenix right here and now. "Acting like that towards our Admiral, and then assaulting one of our destroyers - _what on Earth good are you for us, I wonder? Have you not caused us enough pain and destruction already!?"_

"Yamashirou! Fusou! Stand down, please!" Admiral Nishimura yells, standing in front of Phoenix to block their line of fire. "The American government will be up in arms if they find out that one of their newly constructed ship girls has been attacked by Japanese ship girls. Calm yourselves!"

"But - "

_**"That is an order, Yamashirou!"**_

Grinding her teeth, Yamashirou deactivates her weapons and takes them offline to pack them into her gearbox. Once packed up, she tears herself away, standing behind her older ship sister Fusou and facing her back to the Admiral and Phoenix.

"There wasn't a need to be goin' on attackin' me," Phoenix chuckles, like nothing bad ever happened. "See, look. Hibiki's alright, she's a phoenix, after all."

To the ship girls' surprise, Hibiki's hand is not being damaged by the fire that Phoenix has given her. Instead, it continues to burn on her hand like a torch, and Hibiki, amazed by this, is waving her right hand slowly about, as if trying to make sure that her newfound fire won't go out by itself. Phoenix slowly approaches Hibiki again.

"See? I knew you had it in ya. Birds of a feather flock together, right?" Phoenix grins cheerfully at Hibiki, who stands up excitedly.

"Can - can you teach me?" Hibiki asks Phoenix, unable to contain her excitement.

"_Can _I teach ya?" Phoenix grins madly, and swooping down, she sweeps Hibiki off her feet and jumps straight back onto the water. "More like, _what _should I teach ya! C'mon!"


	5. I Remember

**A/N:**

**The fourth entry was focused on the American WW-II light cruiser U.S.S. ****_Phoenix. _****I've seen the Pacific Volume 1, and their original US fleet concept art is fantastic. Even the Chinese knock-off version of Kantai (the one I know, at least), Zhan Jian Shao Nyu, has fantastic original concept art for the various fleets of the era. You may have even noticed that I've blatantly used some of the designs, partly because I like their designs so, and partly because I'm not the most imaginative when it comes to original character design.**

**For the fourth entry in particular, upon researching the U.S.S. ****_Phoenix, _****I found out that Phoenix fired the crippling torpedo salvo that disabled Yamashirou at Surigao Strait, eventually leading to her destruction. For this, I decided to write in a standard story format but focus on the interactions between Phoenix and the members of the fateful Nishimura fleet. Even the Admiral's name is almost identical, and the discourses between Nishimura's fleet and Phoenix are references to the battle of Leyte Gulf.**

**This is why I'm a history major. Because if, just if, in the case that historical figures and objects can be revived and pitted against one another once again in different circumstances, what they would say and how they would interact is a perfect field of literary exploration.**

**Something that I don't personally understand is why the Pacific Vol. 1 depicts Phoenix in a Chinese qipao. Perhaps there's a reference to that that I don't know about. Whichever the case, she has a flamethrower, so nothing else matters.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Admiral? What're ya doin' out here?"

My heart skips a beat as soon as the voice of the one ship girl I didn't expect to hear at a time like this calls out behind me, so I turn around to see who's called out to me, even though I shouldn't, because I already know who it is.

"O-Oh, heya, Maya."

Maya, my beloved heavy cruiser and ship girl, frowns as she approaches me. I can hear the long, wild grass crunch underneath her heavy boots.

"Are you makin' fun 'a me?"

"Huh? How - wait, how was I even making fun of you?"

"Never mind...maybe I thought your tone towards me sounded stupid or somethin'..."

"What's that all about..."

"Shut it."

Maya takes the liberty of sitting down next to me. She sighs a bit.

"So, yeah, for your information, Marshal Admiral Yamamoto-dono just called, and he told me to tell ya that they're planning a complete naval fleet review in two weeks."

"Oh yeah? That'll be cool, we haven't had one in a while. I heard that Chief of Staff Hiroyasu-dono and Rear Admiral Inoue-san were discussing the possibility for the Emperor. It's going to be his birthday pretty soon, and he really likes the Navy, so..."

"I know, right. I'm sooooo lookin' forward to it. We'll all be out there, lined up 'n deployed alongside the big ships, and all the people cheerin' and playin' music at us - "

"Let's not get too carried away, here. I know you liked your first naval fleet review, but - "

"Sh-Shut up! It's exciting, is all! You'd do the same too, if you were there! You get caught up in the excitement!"

"Yeah...whatever..."

Only Maya and I know this spot we're sitting in. We're still technically inside the naval base here at Sasebo Naval Arsenal, but this's a spot only my old man, my grandfather on my mom's side, knew about when he was the former Admiral of this place. It's nothing special; just a bit of a grassy cliff with a single tree that overlooks the entire harbor here at Sasebo. You might be thinking, well, isn't that nepotism at work here, that my grandfather left the post of commanding officer here at Sasebo to his own grandson? Well, I mean...call it whatever you want, but I like to think of it as my grandfather leaving behind to his grandson a huge legacy.

Part of that legacy is Maya.

I hear Maya folding up her radar spikes, the clicking of folding metal popping lightly in my ear, and soon, I feel the side of her head rest against my shoulder as she leans against my big white winter naval officer's coat that I've taken off and set behind me as I sit leaning against the lone tree here.

"How did you know I was here?"

I can feel Maya's scrutinizing and piercing gaze drilling into my cheek.

"You idiot, where the hell else would you be when you just mysteriously go AWOL all of a sudden?"

I can't help but pop a shy grin.

"Sorry. I have my dumb moments, you know that."

"Yeah, I wish you'd have less of them. Remember the time when I came back from my mission to Micronesia? The way ya bawled out at me, cryin' in front 'a everybody, beggin' me not ta do stupid shit...that was a pretty dumb moment for ya, wasn't it?"

The quiet, peaceful sunny day of the early spring suddenly warps into that overcast evening day last year. The rains had stopped, and the harbor and piers and docks were all drenched. The sight of Maya that day makes me want to drink myself to sleep, and I hate alcohol.

"Admiral? Hey, Admiral, what's up?"

I jerk my head up a bit. I've been sinking into the ocean of quicksand of the dark memories of the past.

"Somethin' wrong, there? I can always give ya a hug, you know that."

I smile bitterly, not looking at Maya.

"Well...I was just thinking that my fiancee could be a bit more sensitive about what kinds of memories she kicks up in my mind."

I glance over at Maya after saying this, and I watch her cheeks flush at the fact that I called her my fiancee.

"W-What? It's not like - well..."

Maya looks away from my own less-than-amused gaze as she starts to feel the creeping guilt crawl up her back.

"Sorry. Okay? I'll make it up to you, so - so don't get mad at me."

"You will?"

I find myself smiling, and I can't control it.

"Yeah, but - "

So with permission granted, I get up from my seat in front of the tree, gently push Maya over in my old seat, and sprawl myself out on my back so that my head rests on her lap. Maya just giggles.

"This again? God, I swear, you're such a kid."

Maya proceeds to play with my hair, something that I remember my older sister doing to me back in my childhood days before she left for university. For some reason, having someone mess with my hair in a playful way gets me to relax better than anything else I know.

"I don't think anyone would _want _to grow up, if given the choice."

"Your granddad didn't help with that much, either."

"Yeah, I guess so..."

The soft spring gale coming in from the harbor rolls over like a soft carpet, and it gets me in the daydreamy mood.

"Hey, Admiral, I've always meant ta ask you this, and now that I got a chance now...how close were you with Captain Kato?"

"Grandpops?"

"Yeah. He was my last commanding officer who went down with me, back in the days when I was still a ship. I always heard Captain Kato talking about you and how he'd always wanted to raise you to be a fine officer just like himself and everyone else in the navy during and after the war. It got a bit annoyin', actually, but obviously that was before we met."

The memories of my grandfather and I walking along the beaches and piers of Sasebo over fifteen years ago rush back into my head.

"Grandpops was the man. I mean, _the _man. The fact that you always heard Grandpops always going on and on about me was because he knew that I always wanted to be just like him when I was a kid. Back when the war was still going on, I remember visiting this place as a kid and being granted special access because I was the base CO's grandkid, and all the soldiers liked to screw around with me. But I thought his work was really cool. Walking around in a big ol' fancy naval uniform and kickass coat, a sweet naval cap with a badass emblem, his awesome katana, and the cigar in his mouth, barking orders at the grunts...I wanted to be just like Grandpops. And when I went to my first naval review here at Sasebo - just outside Sasebo Harbor, to be specific - I saw Grandpops standin' at the helm 'a his ship, the Heavy Cruiser Maya, just before his final sortie, and that was when I knew that there wasn't going to be any other future for me but the one as a naval officer. And he knew that, and he nurtured that dream for me."

"Nurtured it?"

"Well, like, he convinced my family to send me off to naval academy to train as a naval officer, saying that 'this nation needs more able-bodied and able-minded soldiers and officers!' and stuff like that. My family wasn't too keen on sending me off to military school. They didn't like the whole pro-war national sentiment that was taking over the country back in the war days, and they didn't want to lose their only son, me, in war."

"So then how did Captain Kato convince them?"

"Like, for one, my tuition was going to be free, which it was, since I was getting in through Grandpop's connections. For two, the fact that the navy managed to defeat America at Midway pretty decisively convinced my parents, along with a lot of other people, that the war was going to end soon, and so my parents figured that the war would be over before I graduated, which turned out to be exactly the case."

I look up at Maya, and I can see her frowning down at me.

"But...didn't like...I didn't survive the war, and Captain Kato went down with me. You said it just now, that...it was his last sortie."

I give Maya a wistful smile. It's not really much of a smile, just a sad twist of my lips.

"Yeah...that's right, he did die with you. It wasn't surprising, really. He said that old, gallant soldiers like him needed to die in a blaze of glory before they grew too old to be of much use to anyone anymore. It's sad, yeah, and my family and I all mourned, but it's what he wanted. It's what the warrior spirit in him wanted the most, and he'll be proud to know that his sacrifice was what won the Battle of San Francisco."

I close my eyes, and soon, I feel Maya's warm fingers press lightly against my cheeks.

"Hey, don't try 'n act like a tough guy. It's okay to cry for your granddad. I won't laugh, I promise."

"Don't worry about me, I'm not gonna suddenly break down and cry in front of you. I've already cried my fill a long time ago, and it's a bit lame to cry about Grandpops' death now. And I wasn't _trying _to act all tough. I'm just saying things how they are."

"Yeah, right."

"Says the girl who came back from Micronesia with both of your kneecaps broken and was still trying to stand up straight."

Maya immediately pinches my cheeks and pulls hard on them.

"Ow, ow, ow, aaahh haaaaawwweeeee."

"Yeah, you _better _be sorry, ya little fuckin' prick."

She lets go, and I rub both of my cheeks, watching the clouds lazily tumble across the blue, blue sky.

"About Grandpops, though..."

"Oh? What about him?"

"How close was he to you? I just felt like asking that."

"I didn't think of him too much. I guess I could say he was the best captain I had so far, since he was a passionate captain who always believed in his crew 'n the goals that the country was goin' for durin' the war. Remember how I had a lot of captains before Captain Kato?"

"Yeah."

"I guess I can say that Captain Kato was the most manly outta all 'a my CO's. I know for a fact that everyone else woulda jumped ship if I ever sank. So when Captain Kato decided to stay onboard and go down with me, screamin' 'This battle is our victory!' or somethin' like that, it really hit me that Captain Kato was just a bit different of a CO than the others."

I grin up at Maya.

"So you're into older, manlier guys, huh? I guess I'm no good for you, then."

Maya blushes again. I love teasing her and getting her all embarrassed, it's so fun to watch her reactions.

"Sh-Sh-Shut up, you fucker! I'm not _specifically _into older, manlier guys! It's just - "

But she stops. And I want to know what she meant to say.

"Just what?"

She looks away from me. She doesn't want to answer. How cute. You're so damn cute, Maya.

"C'mon, finish what you were saying."

_"It's because I saw a bit of Captain Kato in you, when you first became my new CO, okay? Now shut up already!"_

How sweet of you, Maya.

"_Those _days, huh? I still remember them. Those were fun times, when we didn't get along. That's when we both knew who each other was, but we didn't know that we knew. Fun times. I couldn't believe that you were supposed to be the reincarnation of the same ship that Grandpops served aboard on his very last sortie. I thought it was fate...as dumb as I think fate is, sometimes."

Maya doesn't say anything back. Maybe because she's too embarrassed to comment on how we were like to each other back then, three years ago. So I take the liberty of reaching up to Maya's chin, which makes her blush a bit again.

"W-What do you want?"

"Oh, c'mon, don't be like that. I know you like it when I do this."

Maya blushes even harder, because we both know she can't deny it. But my smile fades away slowly as I remove my hand from her chin.

"But still...real talk, Maya, that day when you returned from Micronesia from fighting those Abyssals, the reason why - "

"Oh, you're still on 'bout that? Seriously, drop it already, it's not gonna do anythin' but make you even more dep - "

"No, just listen to me for a second, Maya. It - when I saw you, in the condition that you were when you returned to Sasebo, it really reminded me of the day when the navy commander came to our home and informed us of Grandpops' death. He said that he was Grandpops' direct subordinate as a lieutenant, and that he'd been instructed specifically by Grandpops to escape the ship as it was sinking to survive and return to Japan to tell his family of what ended up happening to him."

At this, Maya's eyes light up.

"Captain Kato's subordinate...that must've been Lieutenant Sawatari. Yeah, he was one of the ones to escape me first when I started to go down, I remember."

"Yeah. So like, anyway, when I saw you that time...it kinda reminded me of the time when Commander Sawatari gave us the news. At least, I felt almost the exact same way both times. I didn't wanna lose you, and...and all the feelings I had from the time when I learned that Grandpops went down with you just kinda flooded over me all at once."

"Yeah, yeah, I know already, you told me, remember? And you know I don't like talkin' about mushy stuff like that..."

I grin again up at Maya.

"Then surely you remember that the evening that you came back from Micronesia, I confessed to you and asked you to be my fiancee?"

Maya blushes the hardest she's blushed yet so far today. She's so embarrassed at this that she can't even get out her thought properly. So I take advantage of her momentary state of stunned embarrassment to grab hold of Maya's right arm and rub her wrist against my cheek.

"Wh-What're you doin', you freakin' pervert!?"

"How am I a pervert when any loving fiancee would do this for their loved one?"

"Don't say s-such things all calmly like th-that!"

"You make it sound like our engagement's a bad thing."

"Well, i-it's not _bad_, it's just - it's just - _I don't like the fact that you always try 'n find a chance to flirt with me!"_

"But yet, you don't do anything to stop me. Why's that, I wonder?"

"Because if I try, I know you'll keep doin' it anyway just to tease me! It's a lose-lose whatever I do!"

"Then just give up."

"No!"

Sighing with a bit of disappointment, I let go of Maya's arm, but she doesn't pull it away immediately.

"But...do you miss Captain Kato?"

"Of course I do. What kind of a question is that?"

"I'm a ship girl, damn you. I don't know - we didn't know what it's like to have human emotions until we got reincarnated like this. So you're the only one I have feelings like this for...and I wanna know if what they say really is true, that...it hurts to have someone like you go away and never come back."

"Well, didn't you feel somethin' like that during the war? When your comrade ships got sunk?"

"Yeah, well, it was sad, yeah, but - but they were _comrades. _Now, they're friends, comrades, yeah, I get that, but...they're not you."

"I guess so. But yeah, I miss Grandpops a lot. He'd be an old fart by now, though, and even if he did survive the war, he probably would've ended up as a grouchy old guy like some of the veterans that live here in the towns surrounding Sasebo. Even though I do miss him, I still think the way he died was better for him, since that's what he wanted for himself. And seeing how much he'd done for me, I won't judge his decisions behind his own death."

"I see."

Something else, though, tickles my mind. Now that Grandpops got mentioned, something tells me that I'm forgetting something really, really important.

But what is it again? I need to -

"Ah, that's right."

"Huh? What is?"

"I remember the day before that last naval review, Grandpops took me up to this spot right here. He said that it was his own little hiding spot away from the rest of the base, and that since he was going off to war, he wanted to show it to me in case something happened to him. He said that if he made it back from the war, he'd give me a special present or something to commemorate the war. Obviously, since he died, I never ended up getting that special present or whatever. I kinda wonder what it was sometimes, you know?"

I look back up at Maya.

But...she has a weird face on that I've never seen her have.

"Hold on, Admiral."

Maya stands up, forcing me to sit up to let her get up, and she hurries away down the small hill, through the clump of dense vegetation that hides this little cliff away from the rest of the base. What the hell? Don't tell me that she somehow actually...

She comes back after a few minutes, and when I hear her walking back up, I turn to look at her. It's obvious the way she's walking that she's holding something behind her back.

"So, um..."

Maya sits down on my left, clearing her throat all official-like and stuff.

"So yeah, um...I...I wanted to keep this a secret from you, but...now that you mentioned it, I thought...y'know, that it might be a good time..."

"You actually have it?"

Maya nods.

"What happened was that...um, Captain Kato - as he ordered Lieutenant Sawatari to escape, he handed him that 'special present' he mentioned to you. He didn't just tell Lieutenant Sawatari to survive to go tell your family about his death, he also wanted him to keep your present safe."

I can't believe it.

"So, like, when...when I was first constructed, Lieutenant - er, well, I guess Commander now - Sawatari asked to see me, and he gave me the present, telling me to hand it to you when the time came. So...here...I guess..."

Maya shyly hands me what she's holding behind her back. It's a small but long white briefcase, and it's pretty heavy. I open it up and take out what's inside.

It's a 1:36 scale model of the Heavy Cruiser Maya, dated December 13th, 1944, a week before Maya was sunk.

I find myself frozen where I sit as I gaze at it, and I can feel my right eye welling up.

"Thanks, Maya."

That's all I can get myself to say at the moment, and I rub my right eye to stop the tears.

"H-Hey, don't you be cryin' on me now! I just gave you somethin', that's all!"

"Yeah, yeah, I got'cha..."

After inspecting the ship for a long time, I sigh and put it back in its briefcase. I'll set it up in my office back at base.

"Hey, Maya."

I grab my military coat and reach into my right coat pocket, pulling out a few folded papers.

"Yeah, what?"

"As thanks for this, I've got something that _I _wanna give you, too."

"I-Idiot, don't think that you owe me anything for this, I'm - I'm just doing what I need to do..."

"I don't care. Firstly, this."

"It's a two-parter!?"

But Maya takes the paper that I've unfolded and reads it. I watch keenly for her reaction, and sure enough, as soon as she realizes what the paper is all about, I watch her inhale silently and put her hand over her mouth, and the paper in her hand begins to quake.

"No...n-no, this - this c-c-can't be real...this - this's jus' an elaborate trick, i-isn't it..."

"You can see both my stamp and Marshal Admiral Yamamoto's stamp, can't you? It's not a joke, and it's not a dream, either, so stop pinching yourself. I'm having you remodeled in the Kai Ni Circle this weekend."

By now, tears are bursting out of Maya's eyes, refusing to be held back any more. I smile, because I know that the next thing I'm about to show her is going to drive the arrow home. I reach into the _other _coat pocket and pull out a small blue velvet box, so small that it sits on the palm of my hand as I extend it out to her.

"I didn't know how I'd be able to set up the atmosphere to give you this, but I don't think I'll have another chance at this."

I go ahead and open the small box up to show Maya what's inside, and I can tell she already knows what's about to hit her. A ring adorned with a bright blue sapphire in the center, simple but beautiful, sits inside the box, peeking out at Maya.

"This was Grandpops' wife's engagement ring that Grandpops gave to her way back when. When the news that Grandpops died came along, Grandma gave her ring to me, saying that I should give this to whichever girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. She said that it was only appropriate to give me something as a bit of a legacy as well to contribute further to her husband's contribution to my future."

Maya looks at me with trembling eyes that don't seem to know when to stop gushing out tears.

"I-I-Is th-that w-w-why - w-was this w-w-w-why e-everyone - everyone - a-a-at b-base - w-was talkin' a-about a - a - a - a w-w-w-wedding f-for - for the p-past w-week...?"

I smile at my fiancee, revealing the truth, and I gently lift the ring out of its box. I set the box down on the white briefcase in between me and Maya, and I take her hand and lift it up in front of me with the ring in my other hand.

"You know how they used to say that a captain is married to his ship? I wanna make that a reality for the two of us. Is that okay?"

Maya, struggling really, really hard not to just start crying outright, nods slowly with her free hand over her mouth.

"Will you marry me, Maya?"

Maya nods again, this time more emphatically.

"Y-Yes...!"

I put the ring where it belongs, and as soon as I fit the ring securely on her ring finger, Maya tackles me to the ground against the soft grass. She cries the loudest I've ever heard her cry, and it almost makes me wanna cry, too, but I fight the urge. Maya's heavy but comfortable warmth that I feel through her skin and her breasts is all I can feel, besides the moistness that's starting to accumulate on my shoulder where she's pressing her face, and I hug her the best I can in my awkward position on the ground. It takes her a few moments to settle back down.

"You fuckin' bastard, y-you were settin' me up for that, weren't you?!"

Maya still has a few furious stray tears in her eyes that she dabs away as fast as she can.

"Like I said, I was trying to think of a way to give these news to you, and it just so happened that our conversation went to a point where I felt I could pull it off as romantically as possible. You like romantic stuff, don't you?"

Maya grinds her teeth at me, and for a second I think she's going to punch me in the forehead or something, but instead she just lets her head fall forward against my collarbone.

"You goddamned idiot...you could've done this more normally...there wasn't any need to keep any of this a secret..."

"But you kept Grandpops' present for me secret, didn't you?"

"Sh-Shut up! I hate you! That - that's because I _had _to, you jerkface!"

Now that Maya's presenting me an opportunity to hug her, I take it and draw Maya close to me, and Maya doesn't resist. We stay like this for a good amount of time, and the spring gale makes me feel as though time's being slowed down to a negligible constant.

"About that model, what're you gonna do with it?"

"Set it up in my office, probably. That way, I can see you at any time even if you're not with me."

"Idiot, that's...that's not...that's the old me, you know."

"Maya is Maya, no matter what form you take."

"God, can you get any more lame..."

"I bet you like it when I talk smooth to you."

"Shut up...don't be goin' off doing perverted stuff to that thing when I'm not around 'cause you miss me or whatever..."

"Why would I do perverted crap to a model ship, when I already have you for that?"

Maya falls silent. All of a sudden, it's like the whole world just suddenly got real, real silent.

Before I realize what's going on, I look down to see Maya undoing her red sailor tie, letting her ample breasts sag forward some more.

"Whoa, whoa, Maya - I didn't mean _now_, I meant when we actually get married!"

Maya isn't listening to me. She sits up a bit and pulls off the left white shoulder strap of her sailor uniform top so that it hangs against the side of her left upper arm.

"You idiot, you spent all that time setting up a romantic atmosphere, and now you can't read the mood. Why can't we just do it now?"

I can feel my body surge up to the surface of my skin as I realize just how erotic Maya has made herself look. She draws close to me slowly again until her face is right up in mine.

"Isn't it _your _responsibility to make your wife happy? C'mon, you don't want _me _to be the one doin' perverted stuff to _you_, do you?"

She puts her warm lips over mine. I don't know whether to be more surprised than happy or vice versa, but I have other things on my mind now.

Thanks, Grandpops, but this wasn't exactly the way I had planned my proposal to go. But thanks anyway.


	6. I Know Why the Caged Crane Sings 1

**A/N:**

**The previous story is probably one of the more interesting ones of the short stories of this collection for a few reasons:**

**The original request for this story mentioned Shoukaku as the main ship girl, but instead I decided to go with Maya. I am currently taking a class here in Japan called Popular Culture and Media in Japan, and recently we watched some clips from the movie ****_Grave of the Fireflies. _****In the movie, the main character remembers seeing his dad serving aboard the heavy cruiser Maya during a naval review in one scene, and because of how the request was structured, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to put the reference into this short story.**

**In addition, as the dialogue heavily implies, I decided to put the context of the story in an alternate universe, in which Japan in fact prevailed during the war by winning Midway instead of losing it, and then eventually going on to capture Hawaii and take the fight to the West Coast of America, as suggested with the Battle of San Francisco. I wasn't trying to seriously build up a whole new universe, but I was simply building a framework of an interesting setting that is open to reader interpretation.**

**And finally, I decided to try some romantic elements that I normally don't delve into, partly because, well, this story isn't rated M, it's rated T. I am by no means a romantic writer. I much prefer and am much better at writing descriptive narrative on the gritty, the messy, and the bloody happenings of tragedy. But specifically for this story, I decided to step outside that usual framework that I excel in and try something a bit more...risque, I suppose.**

**Thanks for reading,**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

I never liked the sea, to tell you the truth. In fact...I pretty much hate it.

A seemingly unspeakable truth for an Admiral, yeah, I know. I grew up on the shores of the Peninsula, in a house that's worth more than four times the average American's yearly salary in and of itself. My backyard _was _the ocean: all I would have to do to see it is go out to the backyard and stand on the cliffs overlooking the rocky beaches of the Golden Cove.

No, I'm lying, actually. I didn't grow up there. In fact, I can't really tell you for sure where exactly it is that I "grew up".

My family immigrated to America in 1937. I was eleven at the time, and my younger brother six. We moved to America to escape the imperialism that was on the sharp rise during the Thirties: the government, controlled mostly by militaristic politicians and lawmakers friendly with the top echelons of the Japanese military, was ramping up its pro-war and pro-imperialism propaganda, and our "glorious country" was busy sending out its fleets and armies all throughout the Pacific Theater carving its own empire out of the face of the Earth. Japan wasn't about to let the vile countries of the West conquer the entire world, not if we could help it.

Paps, my little affectionate American nickname for my intellectual father, was a cartoonist before we moved here to America. He produced newspaper cartoons (you know them better today as mangas), 4komas, and other such artistic work. We left the country because 1937 was the year when Paps decided that Japan wasn't the country he wanted his children to grow up in. I still remember the night that Paps came back from work one night in our Tokyo apartment, both furious and depressed at what he needed to do for the sake of his family, for our sake, the night that he'd made up his mind. That night was the moment that taught me that human emotions are too complex for me to bother understanding them fully. How can you be angry and sad at the same time? It didn't make sense to me. And to a certain degree, it still doesn't make sense. I'm a straightforward guy - contradicting stuff like this just pisses me off because I can't get myself to understand it.

Paps explained to me after the war about the events leading up to our fateful move to America. He told me how he remembered the Taigyaku Jiken (大逆事件), or "The High Treason Incident" that occurred on May 10th, 1910. Basically, the government found out about an assassination attempt on the emperor at the time being plotted by a bunch of political extremists and jailed the suspects, like the English Gunpowder Plot. Pap's mom, my grandmother, was a manga assistant to Kitazawa Yasuji-san, whom she called Rakuten, and she told Paps of how all the political mangas and cartoons that they used to work on had to be stopped after the incident because of the threat of jail if they produced any comic or cartoon that might seem too "politically sensitive".

The year that shit started to hit the fan was in 1925. Paps remembers this law well: the Chian Ijihou (治安維持法), the Peace Preservation Law of 1925. It used politically sensitive jargon to say that basically, if you did anything the government didn't like or want, they could by law toss you off to jail for up to ten years. Simple as that. And the way the law was worded, the government could twist it around in so many ways that they could fucking turn it into a goddamn pretzel, and they'd still bop people with it. Paps was 25 at the time, and he'd picked up his mother's trade of being a manga artist, working for various magazines, newspapers, and other print media. He was a prolific manga artist, and he was always working on some side manga in his study. I've read a couple of them, and they're actually not bad. But I can see why they were only kept as side projects; all of them had some kind of political or social commentary embedded within them, things that the government would certainly imprison him for. With the Taigyaku Jiken and the Chian Ijihou on his ass, not to mention the escalating imperial fervor of the nation being facilitated throughout the populace by the militaristic government, there was no way for a manga artist like Paps to express himself to the extent that he truly wanted. It's a regret that Paps is going to have to die with eventually, even though none of it was his own fault at all.

We finally did move at the end of 1937, like I said. The Manchurian Incident - better known as the Rape of Nanking in the West - was the final straw. Paps had friends in relatively important government positions and various reliable sources because of family connections and connections through his job, so he had a better sense of what was going on there in Manchuria than most other people in Japan at the time. He declared that he wasn't going to force himself or his own wife and children to live in a country where our fellow countrymen were massacring other people in other countries in the name of imperialism. It wasn't that he wasn't patriotic or that he didn't want to see his own country thrive and prosper, but he had been a bit opposed to Japan's expanding militarism at the time and grew more and more staunchly opposed to it as time dragged on. The Manchurian Incident was the last straw, like I said, and within a week after Paps came back home that fateful night, we packed up our stuff, sold everything we couldn't carry with us, hopped on a boat bound for Torrance, California, and sailed across the Pacific.

I remember the excitement that I felt during the boat ride across the sea. It was my first time being exposed so grandly to the middle of the vast, mysterious blue ocean. My parents always tell me how I never really knew what fear was as a kid; I'd always go around doing stupid things just for the sake of experiencing them and getting myself pretty banged up. I mean, the boat ride itself was pretty damn boring, I'll be honest. But I managed to bear with it by thinking of all the exciting things I'd be able to do and experience once we made it across and settled in a new land. I pretended I was Boken Dankichi-kun or Christopher Columbus, sailing across the grand blue ocean in search of new lands to explore and claim. My younger brother was even more annoying than I was at the time, so together, we ran around on the decks of the boat, causing lots of embarrassment and grief for our parents, being the dumb idiots we were.

But those were the days when I still felt excited to see what the uncertain future held for me. Those were the days when I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that the ocean wasn't just used for traveling and exploring, but also for destroying and killing. But how would I have known, I was just a stupid eleven-year-old kid.

We arrived just before New Year's of 1938, moving into our house at the Golden Cove. A good friend of Paps' arranged for that house to be provided for us, fortunately enough, with the help of a few associates living in Southern California at the time. Again, those were the days when getting a house in a place like the Peninsula was simple, easy, and quick. And in our case, completely free. Nowadays it's a whole 'nother story, but that's not the point. We lived there in that house, and my brother and I went off to school, learned English, and built our lives from the ground up again.

And then the FBI rolled up to our house like the fucking po-po and knocked on our door.

Executive Order 9066. February 19th, 1942, the date which will live in infamy.

But then again, no president would be willing to label his own dates as such, so we simply got screwed out of our minds.

Barely four years after we arrived to rebuild our lives in the strange as mythical land known as the United States of America, we packed up our bags again (only two suitcases and _nothing _else) and got deported off to Manzanar.

I remember how Paps explained to me and my brother before we boarded that bus off to the internment camp that the "trip" we were taking to a whole new place wasn't a trip at all. He said that we were going to get locked up in a place called Manzanar War Relocation Center, and when we asked him why, he said this:

"Because we're dirty Japs. That's why."

I won't ever forget those words and how he said them. For the first and only time in my life, I heard my father sound resentful.

I've heard him sound angry, I've heard him sound pissed off. But that's the only time I've ever heard him sound resentful.

Resentful at the fact that he and his family were about to suffer for the next three and a half years on the grounds that we were spies, that all people of Japanese descent were all rats and moles, spying on every corner of the West Coast for the Imperial Japanese Navy.

It's one of those moments that when you were a kid, you knew it meant something important, that it's something you need to remember for later because you don't quite understand it now. And once you're older, you look back on that moment, remember what that moment felt like, and you understand the meaning, however many so years later down the road, and wonder if you should feel bad for not understanding the importance of that moment when it had happened.

Mom was a frail woman, a true cherry blossom. She had initially opposed our move to the States, but after the Manchurian Incident, there was nothing she could do to stop our move. She always had a weak body all throughout her life because of a debilitating fever she had as a child, and giving birth to two boys had robbed her of much of her pre-marriage health. The voyage across the Pacific also worsened her condition, and finally, Manzanar killed her. The climate there was brutal, unlike the pleasant, moderate weather of the Peninsula that Mom quickly grew to love, and Mom didn't last six months. Whatever excitement I had felt going to and arriving at Manzanar died along with her. That was when I personally realized that there was no longer any reason for me to have hope in the future, much less look forward to it.

We were Japanese-American interns at an internment camp. Like the mulattoes of the centuries of slavery and like our Jewish counterparts, the abstract laws of race were imposed upon us by higher powers we had no say against and no way to deter. I didn't realize it at the time, but the word "hope" not only was never written into our dictionary - it simply didn't exist to begin with.

All these years, too, weakened Paps severely, and the death of our mother, his beloved wife from their childhood days, left him with very little willpower to forge on. We were his reasons to continue to survive at Manzanar. He didn't want us to end up like those hundred or so orphans at the Children's Village at the corner of the camp. So he picked himself up. We cremated Mom's body, put the ashes in a small tinderbox, and buried it with the graves of the other victims of the camp.

Then, on July 16th, 1945, the military guards came to our little cabin and called Paps out. By this time, Paps was working with Yashima Taro, another Japanese immigrant, using his manga drawing talent to create anti-Japanese war propaganda that the US planes would drop in leaflets over Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to demoralize the Japanese troops. Paps came back inside with the saddest face I've ever seen him have and said that I had to go with the guards. I asked why, and where to, but Paps simply said that the guards would tell me the details.

I wouldn't see either Paps or Takahisa, my younger brother, again for another four years.

I was taken to a secret US research base at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. I was informed that I was to be part of a hyper-clandestine American military project known as the Manhattan Project, and that I was going to have to be a part of it because they needed a teenage boy of Japanese descent as part of their project. And because I had skipped a few grades before our deportation and maintained those grades at the school at Manzanar, the Manhattan Project brass noticed this and pulled me into their little science project.

They told me that earlier that year, in April 1945, American PBY Catalina reconnaissance attack planes had intercepted a strange Japanese convoy headed for Sasebo Naval Arsenal down at Nagasaki. They disabled the convoy and had American destroyers patrolling the waters nearby to come and investigate the convoy, and they recovered what appeared to be a teenage human girl being transported inside a large shipping crate. The girl and the crate she was in was confiscated, and it was flown back to White Sands for the Manhattan Project to study.

American codebreakers had learned of a secret Japanese Navy research program to construct high-tech naval personnel who could wield the power of warships of their own accord to strengthen their weakening navy and their correspondingly weakening grasp over the seas of the Pacific Theater as US forces kept pushing the Japanese back towards the turf of their own country. This was first known as far back as 1943, but they weren't taken seriously because, well, just the idea of girls running around acting like warships was laughed at by every single top brass in the American government and military. So they didn't do anything about it. But in December 1944, several capital English dreadnoughts were RKO'd out of nowhere in the middle of the English Channel, and soon after, American and British soldiers fighting against German forces on the border of West Germany began reporting sights of strange, inhumanly powerful girls, mind-bogglingly beautiful and equally as destructive. They wouldn't succumb to bullets, no matter how large the caliber, and they wielded cannons on their backs like tanks. That's when the Manhattan Project was formed, for those rumors of the Japanese fleet personnel program could very well have been true after all, in a desperate attempt to try and figure out how to possibly create such soldiers like them.

In February 1945, those rumors were confirmed. Japan had built up their ship girl fleet under the codename Shin-Kantai (新艦隊, or literally "New Fleet"), and had pushed back American naval power significantly. This new Japanese fleet wasn't strong enough to completely kick out American naval presence in Imperial Japanese territory, but it was enough to buy them lots of time and lots of breathing room, for cities like Tokyo were about to get firebombed. They'd already had one huge naval battle, the Battle of Okinawa, in which the Shin-Kantai squared off against half of the entire American navy, and it lasted for almost thirty-eight hours and ended with no conclusive victor. However, the Japanese were considered the winners, because their naval yards and ports at Okinawa were, at the end of the day, still held firmly in Japanese hands, thanks to the service and sacrifice of the Shin-Kantai. Clearly, the Shin-Kantai was even match for the powerful and mighty American navy, which had up to this point soundly kicked the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was a wake-up call, that America would most likely need its own "New Fleet", and fast. But how would the American navy go about building it when they had no idea how?

Despite the alleged German ship girls' appearance in the war, they mysteriously disappeared when Germany surrendered in May 1945, and none of them were captured by the Allies before then, either, so until this Japanese ship girl was sent to White Sands, the Manhattan Project was stuck, with no resources to work off of. The Japanese had found out that their secret codes for radio transmission and communication had been broken, so they changed their comms, rendering American codebreakers ineffective, so information about the Shin-Kantai couldn't just be easily stolen off the air. In addition, even though the defeat of Germany meant that Japan was effectively fighting the rest of the war one on three, the combination of the Shin-Kantai and what was left of the Imperial Japanese Navy against the three combined navies of the United Kingdom, the USSR, and the United States, the naval skirmishes that broke out soon after Germany's surrender showed that Japan's miraculous new navy could very well hold their own and single-handedly fend off attacks from three directions. It seemed like every time the Allies' navies faced off against the Shin-Kantai, the Shin-Kantai was somehow getting stronger and stronger, as though they were getting upgraded like crazy. The sailors who were rescued from ships sunk by the ship girls of the Shin-Kantai and had seen them said that they had the ferocious looks of wild animals trapped and forced to fight for their very lives, and indeed, it would certainly be game over if the Shin-Kantai and the rest of the Imperial Japanese Navy didn't hold down the fort for their country.

The Imperial Japanese Navy got carried in the backpack of the Shin-Kantai, and _everyone _knew it, including the Japanese populace, courtesy of pro-Shin-Kantai propaganda.

But despite all this, Shoukaku was to be, ironically enough, America's one hope to break the naval stalemate and win the war for the Allies. I had been brought to White Sands to communicate with her and have her reveal the technical secrets of the Japanese Shin-Kantai. As it would turn out, the two of us would be vested with the power to end a war neither of us had any reason to be a part of.

And that was how I met my wife.

* * *

_**to be continued  
**_


	7. I Know Why the Caged Crane Sings 2

July 17th, 1945. The day I met my wife.

I don't consider myself a terribly sentimental guy, but I do remember the exact moment in time when I laid my eyes on her. Shoukaku was sitting in a chair in an empty quarantine room, with bulletproof glass on all sides of the containment room. The Manhattan Project scientists had managed to figure out how to activate her, but they failed to make any more progress past that. This was where I had to come in to finish the job.

They put out a chair for me to sit in, in front of Shoukaku. I was instructed to speak with the girl, have her talk to me and tell me about the Shin-Kantai's technological secrets and background, anything relevant to the Shin-Kantai. So for an hour I sat there like a dumbass, awkwardly talking to the most beautiful girl I've ever set my eyes on, trying to get her to say something, anything. Her facial features were like Mom's: gentle, frail, and warm, very Japanese-like, but her silvery-white hair threw me for a loop, because who the hell ever heard of an Oriental person having anything other than dark brown or black hair. The fact that she never once smiled or made any facial expression other than a perpetual frown didn't help to accentuate the warm features of her face.

She was a cherry blossom petal that had somehow found itself on American soil, thousands of miles away from home. And at the time I first met her, I knew she was withering away quickly.

After that awkward hour, she finally spoke her first words to me in Japanese.

"Did they force you to come here as well?"

I nodded without hesitation. And that was the start of our very first conversation.

So we talked for another hour straight in Japanese, completely disregarding the fact that we had top military officers and scientists observing us all around us. It was my first truly surreal experience. Having a conversation with an angel of death inside a highly classified military research base, trapped inside what was more or less a prison cell and being watched by too many pairs of eyes like we were zoo animals, and neither of us gave a single shit. You'd have to be insane not to think twice about the situation as a whole.

Nowhere as insane as the people who started an entire world war, though, so I guess I'm still an okay human being.

Shoukaku told me that she was supposed to be transported to Sasebo Naval Arsenal at Nagasaki to reinforce the New Fifth Carrier Division with her fellow sister carrier Zuikaku and a few other destroyer divisions, but obviously things didn't go to plan. Since she knew that I, too, was no less a prisoner than she was, Shoukaku didn't want me to suffer because of her reluctance to cooperate with our American captors, so she asked me what I would do should she reveal the secrets of the Shin-Kantai to me. I said that I was going to honest with her; I was going to pass the information to the Americans, because I was going to do everything I could to go back to my family at Manzanar. I explained to her about Executive Order 9066, how all the Japanese Americans, traitor or not, were indiscriminately rounded up and kicked off to internment camps because of the war hysteria against the evil Japs, along with a handful of German-Americans and Italian-Americans.

Oh, my bad, I shouldn't say "indiscriminately", because it should seem that Americans are discriminatory as fuck.

I explained to Shoukaku about Mom, how when she died, Takahisa and I had to grow the fuck up and learn how to take care of ourselves. So I apologized to Shoukaku, but I already knew what I was going to do. I apologized to her because I would be the reason why Japan, her country, would lose the war, if the Americans managed to pull off what they needed to in order to turn the tide of the war back in their favor.

Shoukaku asked me why I felt the need to apologize to her. Wasn't Japan my own country, after all? Hell, I was born there, right? If I wanted to betray my own country, that should be my own decision to make, shouldn't it? Something like betrayal, something like treason - a mere apology won't ever make up for the kind of damage that a single act of treason can do.

I had to explain: I had no country. Takahisa and I inherited Paps' loss of faith in his own country, and because he had taken good care not to expose us to the imperial propaganda of the country while we still lived in Tokyo, neither Takahisa nor I felt any real devotion or patriotism towards Japan. And while our new life here in America before our deportation was great and happy, none of that matters anymore because of what Roosevelt did to us.

Executive Order 9066: February 19th, 1942, the date which will live in infamy; the date on which the lives of my family and my entire sense of patriotism were gassed to death.

I told Shoukaku that she was lucky. She was Japanese, built to fight for Japan and defend it to her very last breath if need be. She knew exactly what she needed to do, had she not been captured, she knew where her loyalties lay, she had the power of patriotism on her side, and she needed no other reason than a war on her own country to know what her duty was. Even if her cause would eventually turn out to be a doomed one, she still had a cause to fight for, no matter how futile.

I was Japanese-American. Paps had explained to us, once we left Japan, that we could probably never return to Japan, because our own countrymen would label us as traitors, unpatriotic sons of bitches who defected to the enemy just before the war if we ever did go back. So we couldn't look to Japan for a sense of identity. America was now no different. I found it impossible to feel any sense of patriotism towards a country that labeled not just me and my family but _everyone _of an entire ethnicity as spies and threw us like cattle into cattle ranches off in the middle of nowhere. The only patriotism I had by that point, I told Shoukaku, was the one I felt for my family, because that was all I had. I didn't care what I needed to do to ensure that Paps and Takahisa would make it through their time at Manzanar. It's not like they were in any real danger, and by that point we'd all gotten acclimated to the harsh life that Manzanar forced onto us, but the future was uncertain, and I wasn't about to let any misguided hopes impede my devotion to the safety of my family.

A rebel without a cause, then - not a nationalistic one, anyway, that was demanded of the counties during the war. But I couldn't rebel outright - I had to figure out my own way of rebelling.

So if this meant that I needed to "betray" a country that was thousands of miles away, if this meant that I needed to sacrifice Shoukaku's desire to protect her country in order to protect my family, then so be it. I told Shoukaku that she, like me, needed to make a decision. Either she could keep silent and not know what would end up happening to her but protect the secrets of the Shin-Kantai and screw me over, or she could start talking and screw herself and Japan over.

Either way, we both knew that one of us would have to get fucked before we left that containment room. I had already made my move; Shoukaku was the one who needed to respond.

As Shoukaku later told me, she felt torn between her own desire to sacrifice herself to protect the rest of her comrades of the Shin-Kantai and her pity for me, an innocent boy who had nothing to fall back on but his own family in a country that didn't want them. But eventually, she couldn't bear to ignore what was right in front of her. She agreed to reveal the Shin-Kantai's secrets, in exchange for her safety, my safety, and the safety of my family.

Shoukaku also asked that she be not forced to fight against her own comrades...something that, to this day, I'm not so sure if it was really honored or not.

Things got rolling from there. With me as the translator (they didn't allow anyone else of Japanese descent to be a part of the Manhattan Project for security reasons), Shoukaku explained everything about the Shin-Kantai: the construction methods, the genetic modifications, even down to the Shin-Kantai's new fleet tactics. She explained that in the wake of the Battle of Midway, where the bulk of the Japanese fleet, especially the carriers, got shredded and utterly wrecked, the top command of the Imperial Japanese Navy had been freaking out, because they had known how deep in shit they were after losing four of their precious carriers. They'd foreseen the American navy pushing all the way right up to Japan's doorstep, so right after they learned what happened at Midway in June 1942, they contacted German engineers and scientists and begged them to help rebuild the Japanese Navy. They promised to attack Russia as soon as the new fleet, which would be later known as the Shin-Kantai, was constructed to alleviate pressure off Germany's eastern front. At first, the Germans laughed at the Japanese, because June 1942 was the heyday of the German advance into Russia. Nothing could stop them - until Stalingrad fucked them, because Hitler ignored the lesson that Napoleon learned a century or two before: don't invade Russia anywhere near the winter. Once they lost Stalingrad and Russia was back on the offensive, the Germans realized that the Japanese's initial request might actually become a good idea, so they shipped over a team of their scientists in a U-Boat, and they got to work with the Imperial Navy staff to construct the Shin-Kantai.

Ironically enough, by sending that team of scientists over to Japan, Germany sabotaged their own Nova 6 Biochemical Weapons Program and V-2 Long-Range Missile Program by splitting their valuable pool of scientific know-how and prowess in half. When Germany surrendered and America captured a good portion of those German teams of scientists, researchers, and engineers, one of them commented how if Japan didn't steal away half their team, they most likely could've finished their Nova 6 and V-2 programs and turned the tide back in Germany's favor. But history is always 20-20, so sucks for them.

But anyway, the Shin-Kantai is a fleet of genetically modified human beings capable of wielding the power of the warships who were sunk before them. Because they didn't have time to sit around thinking of new names for the Shin-Kantai, the IJN command simply gave the same names of their former navy to the Shin-Kantai. As it turned out, there were even a few ship girls of the Shin-Kantai who served in combat alongside their full-size warship counterparts. Pretty interesting how that turned out.

With the crucial information supplied by Shoukaku, the Manhattan Project brought over the German scientists, researchers, and engineers who were captured by American forces and bribed them with full wartime pardons to have them help construct America's own Shin-Kantai, the United States Auxiliary Fleet, or the USAF. By this point, America didn't trust Communist Russia, so the secrets of the Shin-Kantai were only shared with Britain, who got to work immediately constructing a ship girl fleet of their own.

By the time that America deployed the USAF, Japan was on the verge of breaking out of the blockade that the Allies had set up around Japan. They needed to, otherwise Japan would soon be strangled to death from being choked out of vital resources that needed to be shipped into the country.

All the while I had been helping Shoukaku reveal the secrets of the Shin-Kantai to the Americans, I learned all about the Shin-Kantai's tactics along the way. The Manhattan Project team noticed this, so in November 1945, I, a fifteen-year-old Japanese American teen with no reason or desire to participate in a war that tore my family's lives apart, was given an American navy officer's uniform, the rank of Rear Admiral (1-Star) in the United States Navy and the rank of Fleet Admiral of the United States Auxiliary Fleet, the U.S.S. _California_ (BB-44) as my own flagship, command of my own Pacific fleet squadron, Task Force 80 of the US Seventh Fleet, and the entire newly constructed USAF, all of whom were named after the entire United States navy's warships, just like the Shin-Kantai.

That was the only time I ever truly wanted to kill myself. My disgust was so thick that it was all my five senses could perceive for a while.

But thanks to Shoukaku, I didn't.

By the time November 1945 rolled around, I had spent so much time with Shoukaku that we had gotten hooked up together. It was probably inevitable, now that I look back, considering our situation then, because it wasn't like there was anyone else for Shoukaku to talk to, and anyone else for me to get close with. Shoukaku promised me that she would gladly serve me against her own country, but I didn't want her to do that. Instead, I kept her with me on board the _California_, and she acted as my fleet's second-in-command. The USAF was initially disgruntled by the fact that two Japanese people were going to command them, but our first battle, the Battle of Attu Island at the very last of the Aleutian Islands up in Alaska, quickly dispelled any of their suspicions that we might be traitors. The Shin-Kantai had been sent to breach the Russian blockade at the northern Japanese territorial seas, which they easily accomplished, and like how the Americans island-hopped their way up to Japan's front door, the Shin-Kantai would spearhead the way for a Japanese counter-invasion of the American Aleutian Islands, an operation they had failed a few years before. That was their plan, anyway, but the Russians notified the Americans of the Shin-Kantai's sudden presence in northern waters. And by making an educated gamble that the Shin Kantai were planning on invading into the Aleutian Islands, I ordered the USAF and Task Force 80, composed of my dreadnought battleship, six destroyers, three light cruisers, two heavy cruisers, and five submarines, up to Attu Island on an interception course. Because the Russians didn't specify how large the Shin-Kantai force that had defeated their blockade line was, I was going to play it as safe as possible and bring the entire USAF up, something that the my fellow American admirals disapproved of as a waste of resources and potential firepower that could be dedicated elsewhere.

As it turns out, 85% of the Shin-Kantai was present at the Battle of Attu Island. Both sides took heavy losses, but once the tide of the battle turned in our favor, I had Task Force 80 move in to drive the Shin-Kantai back, and I ordered the rest of the USAF to pursue and capitalize on their retreat. We managed to send them all the way back to Urup Strait. There would be no more doubts in the USAF about my or Shoukaku's abilities to lead the fleet.

The Battle of Attu Island was a critical victory; it was the beginning of the end for Japan. The little bit of breathing room that the Shin-Kantai had bought for Japan to devote all its resources to the Shin-Kantai for a chance at victory in the war, no matter how faint, was quickly choked out again once the British brought in their own ship girl fleet, called the Royal Guard Navy, or the Royal Girls, as their more famous and preferred name came to be. Once the USAF and the Royal Girls got into position and shut down every single one of the Shin-Kantai's attempt to regain control of Japanese territorial waters, it was over, militarily speaking. The USAF and the Royal Girls were even better equipped and and better constructed than the Shin-Kantai girls were, and simple math dictates that two fleets are always better than one. The grand final showdown was the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, in which the USAF, the entire American Seventh Fleet, including my Task Force 80, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Girls squared off against the Shin-Kantai and the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was a straight-up brawl, like two tired and bloody boxers slugging away at each other, desperate to finish off the other before it was too late. Neither side held anything back, and if there was ever a time that Japan needed its young men to die like the cherry blossoms, it was at that battle.

That's the one moment in my life that I can genuinely feel proud of myself. I'm usually never proud of myself, and I don't say that just be one of those hipsters who treat modesty like it's some kind of superiority complex. I just don't have a lot of reasons that I can think of to feel good about myself. But I sent the flagship that I was on, the U.S.S. _California_, straight into the middle of the sea, escorted by my task force behind me, the USAF on my right, and the Royal Girls on my left. Everyone - the USAF girls, the Royal Girls who'd fought with me and my task force at several naval battles, and some of the American naval officers who grew to see me as a reliable officer and comrade, begged me to pull back, saying that my flagship would most certainly be targeted and sunk in the final battle. Shoukaku nearly convinced me to pull back, saying that I needed to look out for my family, including her. The night before the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, Shoukaku confessed her love for me, promising that if we got out of this battle alive, she would willingly marry me and help me raise a family and a life of my own anywhere I wanted in the world.

No matter how many flags were raised on that night, it wasn't enough to change my mind. There are some things that must be done. No matter how shitty the situation, no matter what my own personal feelings are about the situation, and no matter what's happened in the past, I didn't want to be just some generic Admiral who hid behind lines and lines of warships, letting them slug out the battle and come in to claim the victory for myself. I mean, yeah, I never wanted to have any part of the war, that's for sure. But I knew that even despite that, now that I had it and there was nothing I could do about it but see it through, I was going to make the best of it and make a name for myself, just to spite everyone and everything that had ever done me any kind of injustice and give a big fat middle finger to Roosevelt and any American who thought that all Japs were spies. Like the 100th Infantry Battalion, like the 442nd, and like the 522nd, I was going to rub it in Uncle Sam's racist motherfucking face that my thin eyes and my yellow skin have nothing to do with my ability to get the job done. And if pulling an Admiral Horatio Nelson was what I needed to do to prove it, then so fucking be it.

I told Shoukaku that she couldn't possibly waste herself on a stubborn bastard like me. She ought to survive this war and go out looking for someone who would actually make her happy and not go into a battle in which he would probably get himself killed like an idiot. Shoukaku refused, obviously. She said that she'd already found that person. I jokingly told her that four months was too short a time to find the love of her life.

We had our first night battle together in my captain's quarters aboard the _California, _that night before the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea. I'm not one for sexual euphemisms, but that wasn't something I could ignore. But it certainly did solidify our marriage three years later.

The Battle of Sagami-nada Sea lasted sixteen hours, and we defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Shin-Kantai by driving them back into Tokyo Bay. With their once-powerful Shin-Kantai in tatters and no reliable military presence to match ours, the Emperor intervened directly and personally asked his government and military to prevent causing his people even more harm and sorrow by capitulating to the Allies.

I had become wounded in the fight, as I'd expected. My flagship was hit a few times by Shin-Kantai bomber planes, and a large chunk of shrapnel from a nearby explosion on the deck ripped out my left eye and gave me bad burns up and down my left arm and leg, but besides the loss of my eye, I wasn't critically wounded, and thanks to Shoukaku's immediate care, she saved me the use of my burned limbs. My Task Force, and the vanguard units of the USAF and the Royal Girls trapped the remains of the Shin-Kantai in Tokyo Bay, checkmating them. The Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru came aboard my flagship to sign the official surrender documents, and he expressed lament and disappointment when we met, telling me that my talent as an Admiral had been wasted assisting the wrong country, and that had I led the Shin-Kantai, there would still be hope for Japan to prosper as an international power.

I told him that I was already a traitor from the start, ever since Paps brought us over to America in 1937. Had I returned, I would've fared no differently than how I'd suffered in America at Manzanar. When I mentioned Paps' name, Shigemitsu looked shocked. He'd been one of Paps' closest friends, and he never learned of where Paps had gone off to or why.

I told Minister Shigemitsu that someone like him would never understand my own personal reasons to fight in a war that I never wanted to fight in. At the very least, he'd never be able to understand that I wasn't fighting for a country, but instead for myself and the girls whom I've commanded and led and come to respect for their own service. Maybe if he and his goddamn government wasn't so fucking imperialist all the damn time, maybe if he and his government tried to lead the country in a more honest and straightforward way than the blinding nationalistic method that'd been pumped into the country, Paps would've never moved his family across the ocean to the country of the enemy. Because then, a mere fifteen-year-old boy would never have a reason to change the course of history.

I told him to hurry up and sign the documents and get the fuck off my ship.

World War II was done. There I was, a fifteen-year-old kid in a naval uniform that so happens to give him power over an entire American naval fleet, standing on the deck of his flagship looking out at his hometown, not as a citizen, but as a conqueror, in the middle of Tokyo Bay. As resentful as I was at how fucked up my situation was and how the course of events had gone throughout the duration of the Pacific Theater, I thought that it was finally over, that I could finally go back to my family and rebuild our lives again a third time from scratch. But not surprisingly, that wasn't really the case.

But my wife, Shoukaku, was there. She never left me - and she kept me safe. She's the best wife I never thought I wanted or deserved, but she was there.

* * *

_**To be continued  
**_


	8. I Know Why the Caged Crane Sings 3

February 19th, 1946, the end of World War II. On the fourth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru signed the official surrender documents, ceasing all armed conflict.

You can twist things around and say that technically, I was the one who ended the war and freed my countrymen back in the States. But I don't like to think of it like that, it's presumptuous and stupid. It's more that history's an ironic son of a bitch sometimes.

My task force, Task Force 80, and the USAF linked up with Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur at Tokyo Bay on February 21st. There, we and a host of American commanders and top-ranking naval officers and admirals, along with a whole division of assistants, began the American Occupation of Japan, starting that year.

MacArthur congratulated me and my performance at the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, and that President Truman had received word of my decisive last strike against Japan. I was promoted from Rear Admiral to Vice Admiral, from 1-Star straight to 3-Star, something that never happened before in the history of the United States Navy. MacArthur also stated that I had won both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, the two highest military decorations a naval officer like me could be awarded for wartime service. Mind you, I was already the Navy's youngest officer ever, so the fact that I was now a Vice Admiral made a huge splash in every major military in the world. I accepted the promotion but turned down the medals, saying that I refused the medals because I had no need for superfluous pieces of metal that gave me nothing important and meant nothing to me personally. I informed MacArthur that the only way Truman could convince me to accept those awards was to remove Executive Order 9066 and compensate all Japanese Americans like myself who had been deported to places like Manzanar for the past four years of their lives that their own nation had ruined for them.

I remember speaking with Doug - he was a good man who didn't judge people on the basis of the color of their skin, unlike many who shared his own skin color; a man generations ahead of his own time. He told me that while the Japanese Americans being interned would be released, he told me that there was little chance of them being compensated, that if there were ever going to be any compensation at all, they would come decades after our own times, that our children, possibly our grandchildren, would collect those compensations. He said that there would be nothing good that would come out of me refusing the awards, that it was better for me to take them than to ditch them.

Even still, I refused them in the end, and I never did receive them, either. But it doesn't matter - I'm not the kind of person who needs a momento of what happened in the past to remind me of what I've done. The burn scars and my wife are all I need to remind me of that final battle and everything that led up to it.

The only decoration I need is my insignia, the three stars that were pinned to my collar at that point in time.

Because of my special position as commander of the USAF and my familiarity with the Shin-Kantai thanks to Shoukaku, Doug put me in charge of rebuilding Japan's Shin-Kantai forces as part of the American Occupation. This was when I realized that I wouldn't be going home just yet, and when I requested that I head back to California to make sure that my family was safe, Doug denied my request, saying that the Navy brass back home and Truman wanted every capable man to lead the Occupation there in Japan. As I said earlier, I would have to stay there for another three years before I could finally head back home.

The Soviet Union, right after Japan surrendered, went dark. Britain and the US expected this to happen - obviously, capitalism and communism don't mix. The secrets of the ship girls were leaked out of the country by American defectors who managed to steal project information and blueprints from the former Manhattan Project that disbanded after the end of the war and sold them to the Russians, and our U-2 spy planes and SR-71 Blackbirds confirmed that Russia was building so many ports along their coasts that they looked like lines of dominoes from the sky, and by May 1946, our spies in Russia confirmed the Soviet Union's launch of their very own ship girl, a former Shin-Kantai ship girl who was surrendered to the Russians in reparations for the Shin-Kantai's breach of the Russian fleet in the north before the Battle of Attu Island. And by October 1946 - "Red October", as we called it - Russia was fully equipped with its own ship girl fleet.

They were known as the "Spetsnaz" (спецназ).

As soon as we got wind that the secrets behind our ship girl fleets were compromised to the Russians, the vast majority of the former Allied military commanders, me included, knew that it would only be a matter of time before the Russians had a fully operational fleet of ship girls for themselves. Therefore, I was tasked with the responsibility of rebuilding the Shin-Kantai and training them and leading them alongside the the USAF. The USAF itself was divided in half, the Pacific Fleet and the Atlantic Fleet, and the Atlantic Fleet was sent back home to defend America on the Atlantic Seaboard, while the Pacific Fleet stayed, with most of them stationed in American ports in Japan and the rest patrolling the Pacific theater.

By this point, the war known as the "Cold War" began. No one knows when it truly started - some say that it began when the Russians got their hands on ship girl blueprints, others say it started right when Japan surrendered, that there was no pause between the wars.

My Cold War began on October 27th, 1946. Our spy planes indicated that the Atlantic Fleet of the Spetsnaz was being transferred to a new Russian port at Korsakov, at the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, less than two hundred kilometers north of Hokkaido. The Americans weren't about to let Russia stick its own navy right next to a country that we were supposed to be occupying, so they had me lead the Pacific USAF and the remnants of the Shin-Kantai to position ourselves at La Perouse Strait and see what the Russians would do.

I should explain my relationship with the Shin-Kantai first before this.

Immediately after being assigned to my post, because the American Occupation prevented Japan from ever having a military of its own in the future, technically speaking, the Shin-Kantai is an illegal military organization. But because both the Japanese had a fierce sense of pride in their beloved ship girls who fought to the very end for their country and the Americans knew that the Shin-Kantai could prove to be valuable allies in our new conflict against the USSR, I instead consolidated what was left of the Shin-Kantai and the Imperial Japanese Navy and re-established them as the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. Because by technically this was a "self-defense force" that I was forming, I took advantage of the loophole in Article 9 of the new Japanese Constitution that the Occupation put in for Japan, but in reality it's a fully-fledged military like any other.

After the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, of the original 140 or so members of the Shin-Kantai, only 37 survived the war. In addition, I discovered that the German ship girls, the battleship Bismarck, the destroyers Z-1 Leberecht Maass and Z-3 Max Schultz, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, and the U-boat submarine U-511, were being held here as refugees. The Germans had sent them to Japan with their initial team of scientists and engineers to prevent their ship girls from falling into Allied hands, or at least delay their capture. I remember the frightened looks on their faces when I first met with them, because they didn't know what was going to happen to them now that they knew they, the Axis Powers, had lost the war, and their German scientists showed a similar fear.

I informed that because of our new conflict in the Cold War against the Russians, I as an American admiral could not let them return to their home country, because if the Russians got wind of their return, they would most definitely attempt to kidnap the whole lot of them to force them to work for the USSR. Therefore, the German scientists had to work to rebuild the JMSDF in exchange for American protection and a good salary, and the German ship girls joined the JMSDF in exchange for not being sold off as military spoils of war, like Russia's first ship girl, Verniy (Верный), who, before her remodel and overhaul, was known as Hibiki, a Shin-Kantai destroyer.

With that taken care of, I reorganized what was left of the Shin-Kantai. They were demoralized - some angry, some depressed, and some who didn't care anymore. But if there was one thing they could all agree on, it was that they felt humiliated that they were defeated by two of their own: Shoukaku, a Shin-Kantai carrier who was intercepted and stolen away to reveal their secrets, and me, an Admiral of Japanese descent who they thought should have been fighting for Japan. When Shoukaku found out that her ship sister Zuikaku had managed to survive the war, being the only Shin-Kantai carrier to do so besides Shoukaku, she and I went to go visit her at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, where the surviving Shin-Kantai members were being held, Zuikaku refused to see Shoukaku. She said that she had no need to speak to a sister of hers who betrayed her comrades and fought for the enemy. Everyone else felt the same way: they didn't want to accept the fact that a traitor like me was to be their new commanding Admiral.

So I ordered everyone outside onto the middle of the airstrip. It took a bit, but eventually everyone did as they were told. I had Shoukaku stand behind me while I chewed the absolute fuck out of those ship girls.

I told those girls of the Shin-Kantai what I'd gone through the past four or five years of my life. I told them the moment I met Shoukaku, how we weren't so different from each other at that time when we met, and how Shoukaku decided to help me not because she was a traitor to her country, but because she just wanted to help me work towards securing a future for my family in an insecure world. I told them about my feelings, my reasons to fight, how I never wanted any part of this war originally, but now that I had no choice, I was going to do my job in ways that I saw fit. I told them about Mom's death, how it devastated my entire family when she died, how we, especially Paps, felt that we couldn't move forward when she died but still forced ourselves to anyway because the only thing we could do to keep on living was to move forward. I told them that losing a war didn't mean that they must also lose their will, that a defeat, no matter how big and devastating, should never be able to knock you down and keep you down forever. I told them that I, in reality, had no patriotism or political motives to do what I did. I was going to do my job, which was to lead the Shin-Kantai as the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, so that I could go back home and make sure my family could rebuild their lives again from scratch, and that I would bend the ship girls to my will if I had to. If they wanted to resent me at all, then so be it: I would be too busy resenting the country whose flag I wear on my uniform to care.

That was enough for the Shin-Kantai to begrudgingly accept my command, luckily for me and the Occupational Forces, and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was officially indoctrinated on February 26th, 1946, barely a week after Japan surrendered. I had the German scientist team get back to work immediately with the Japanese factories and ports and staff they'd worked with before to construct the Shin-Kantai ship girls during the war, and production of ship girls resumed once more, this time to rebuild the ship girls lost at sea in battle. I had the wounded survivors of the Shin-Kantai flown to naval arsenals across Japan for intensive repairs to get them back into fighting condition again, and by the end of August 1946, all 37 surviving members of the Shin-Kantai were fully repaired and joined by the first twenty newly constructed ship girls built specifically for the JMSDF, not to mention the German ship girls as well. By this point, our scientists, both the Germans and the Americans from the former Manhattan Project, had discovered great improvements for the ship girls, and while the Russians were busy building up their own ship girl fleet, we took the time to remodel and better equip our own and build our new ones to be even stronger. While the Russians knew what we were up to (more accurately, they had an idea that we were preparing specifically for them), both we the Americans and they knew that our ship girl fleets and navies would always be at least two legs up the tech tree, so to speak, in terms of individual ship girl strength and technological superiority. So the Russians had to resort to the one tactic they knew how to use the best: strength in numbers.

Things became even more complicated when Shoukaku told me in private that she was pregnant at the end of May, the third month of her pregnancy. As it turned out, Shoukaku had taken steps to go so far as to make sure she conceived a child with me, all the way back on our first night battle the night before the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, in case I really did become killed in action. She'd done her best to hide the fact from me by covering up her belly and hiding the bulge, but obviously she knew she couldn't hide it for much longer than that. I was just shocked. I could understand Shoukaku's situation and decision-making, but even still, it wasn't exactly how I'd imagined I would become a father. More than anything, I talked with Shoukaku about what this would mean for the both of us. Would I be court-martialed on the grounds that I was sexually abusing Shoukaku and be relieved of my command, never to see Shoukaku again and possibly never meet my child? I was apprehensive, to say the least. Shoukaku said that she would testify on my behalf and do her best to prove that our relationship had been going on for a long time. We decided that going to talk to Doug was the best and safest idea, since we both knew that Doug was a good man.

And sure enough, Doug was more pleasantly surprised than angry that I'd knocked Shoukaku up. He said that he'd had several conversations with the Manhattan Boys, as he called the scientists from the former Manhattan Project who came to Japan to help out with the bolstering of Japanese defense forces for the new JMSDF that I'd created, about the future of the ship girls once they had no more wars to fight. Theoretically, since the ship girls are technically just modified human beings, they can integrate right in with the rest of society, and it was believed that the ship girls could reproduce in normal fashion, but obviously no one had tested that out yet. So the fact that Shoukaku got pregnant confirmed that yes, the ship girls can indeed return to society and lead normal lives and raise families after their wartime service. Doug told us not to worry about any lame court-martial - technically, this was to be treated as a capital offense, but given my crucial role as the head of the JMSDF, nothing would happen to me so long as I didn't do anything blatantly bad, or something outright treasonous. And as long as Shoukaku was willing, I was free to raise a family with her to my heart's content, but Doug reminded me that I should've probably saved this for after I'd served out my post here, however long I was going to stay here.

But that's enough backstory leading up to Red October. On Halloween of 1946, the huge Spetsnaz fleet rolled out of Korsakov Port to meet us. Later, as I would find out through spy plane reports of the event, the Spetsnaz fleet was so big that they outnumbered my fleet nearly two to one. The Russian fleet commander communicated to me by Morse code that he demanded that I remove myself and my fleet from Russian waters, to which I promptly and curtly replied that by remaining within the first thirty kilometers of the La Perouse Strait, I was within legal Japanese waters and the American protectorate boundaries, and that he should have no problem with me stationing my fleet here. After all, the Russians were the first ones to come to Korsakov; I was just simply responding to this action, and thus could not shoulder the responsibility of any attack that resulted from this stand-off. So for about forty-eight hours, my fleet, composed of the Pacific USAF, my Task Force 80, and the JMSDF stared barely five kilometers into the guns of the Spetsnaz fleet. I knew that the pressure was on the Russian fleet commander there at the bay; all I needed to do was sit there and wait for him to make a move, because whatever we did, it was crucial that we did not take the first shot, much like the Battle of Lexington that kicked off the American Revolution. I also knew that the Russian Spetsnaz never before had a live-combat exercise, so I was banking on the hopes that both the Russian fleet commander and the Russian Spetsnaz girls were itching for a fight to see what they could do and to bring honor and victory to Mother Russia.

My gambit paid off, and they fired the first shots at my flagship, the _California_, and we promptly responded with swift and extreme prejudice.

Incidentally, one of my commanding lieutenant colonels tried to take advantage of the chaos of the battle that followed and attempted to assassinate me while Shoukaku and I were busy coordinating the fleet attacks. Once again, Shoukaku saved my life by reacting quickly to the gun that the traitor pulled out and took the bullet to her right breast, and I pulled out my own M1911-A1 handgun and shot him dead before he could think about shooting the baby inside Shoukaku's womb. After making sure that there wasn't about to be a mutiny aboard my own flagship, I took the bastard's dogtags, stuffed it inside one of our 36cm cannons, and had the boys blast it to oblivion, and I personally kicked the body overboard. I didn't give enough of a shit about that fucker to let his family get his body back - after all, he assaulted my fucking wife trying to kill me.

We defeated the Spetsnaz after an eight-hour naval battle. It wasn't even close - the Spetsnaz fought well and valiantly, to their credit, but the facts that the Russians didn't have someone like me who understood the new tactics of naval warfare that suited the ship girls and that the Spetsnaz were a fresh fleet of newly constructed ship girls with only combat training under their belt, proved too much for them. We drove them out of American protectorate waters, but I gave them twenty-four hours to evacuate Korsakov Port before I had our JMSDF battleships Yamato, Musashi, Nagato, and Mutsu test out their new weapons.

Our German and American scientists had been working together on another top-classified weapons project related to the ship girls all the while we were reconstructing, and they managed to produce four working prototypes that they wanted me to take the time to test in a live-combat scenario. Named after JMSDF Yamato, for whom this particular weapon was first developed, the Yamato Nuclear Pulse Cannon Mk. I, or the Yamato Gun for short, allowed those four battleships to erase Korsakov Port from the face of the earth, creating a huge mushroom cloud that we all saw very clearly about fifty kilometers offshore. Fifty thousand people once lived in Korsakov - and now, because of the Yamato Cannons and the huge amounts of radiation they produced, it became - and still is - a ghost town.

I reported this immediately to the scientists, who then shared it urgently with other scientists of the Allied Powers around the world, and it was universally agreed that while we would continue to produce these fearsome weapons, they were to be used extremely sparingly and only for testing purpose, if we could help it. The scientists knew that they had developed a weapon too powerful to exist in human hands, that if this technology fell in the wrong hands, the Cold War would cease being cold for good. Therefore, the United Nations and NATO labeled all fleet personnel as WMD's - weapons of mass destruction. It didn't matter the ship type, _all the girls _were labeled as weapons that could destroy the world.

Even though that sure sounds fucked up, which it certainly did back then too, the girls and I quickly came to realize that it was just political jargon, political buzzwords and crap like that. Even though the Royal Girls, the JMSDF, and the USAF were henceforth known as weapons of mass destruction, it's not like the lives of the ship girls were really significantly affected, if at all, so quickly we disregarded the whole label as just political Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, as that battle was named, secured American naval dominance in the Pacific theater against the Russians for good for at least another two years until 1948. While the Russians rebuilt their Spetsnaz fleet, they no longer dared to trespass further south than Sovetskaya. Like the Battle of Attu Island, which earned me the trust and respect of the USAF girls, the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf secured my firm leadership over the JMSDF, so whatever ill will the original 37 survivors after the end of World War II felt towards me pretty much evaporated. After celebrating Christmas with my ship girls, we held one last goodbye party for the German ship girls (except for U-511, whom we remodeled into RO-500 and consequently decided to stay behind in Japan), and they flew back to Germany to join the launch day of the new West German ship girl navy, called the Deutsche Marine, which British scientists and German scientists who were allowed to stay in Germany following the war built up to complement the Royal Girls in defending the Atlantic waters against Russia's Atlantic Spetsnaz fleet.

As future events would reveal, that particular subordinate officer of mine, Lieutenant Colonel Ranford Lyberger, was one of an alarmingly large number of resentful and disgruntled American naval officers who were irked by the fact that a dirty Jap like me held one of the highest positions in the United States Navy. They had been waiting patiently for the past year ever since I was first given my assignment as the principal commander over the ship girls, both American and Japanese, for me to make a blunder, to make a mistake for them to pounce on and have me removed from my post so that one of their own could usurp my position and do who knows what with the ship girls. Once we returned home from the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, I immediately reported the assassination attempt on my life by Lieutenant Colonel Lyberger to Doug, who then passed on the info to President Truman, and I swiftly got Doug's permission to conduct a navy-wide purge of the navy's officers to weed out anyone who could be proven to have any sort of involvement with the likes of Lieutenant Colonel Lyberger. While it wasn't as cruel as the Red Purges over in the USSR, I did have every single person proven to have connections to_ and _similar sentiments with Lyberger arrested, court-martialed, stripped of their rank, and discharged dishonorably back to the States. It didn't matter who - even Rear Admiral Percy Lowitz of the Seventh Fleet, who had received the Navy Cross for his faithful participation and leadership in the Pacific Theater during the war, got screwed, and he lost his Navy Cross because of me. It's an understatement to say that I took a lot of flak for what I did, that other people shouldn't have to suffer for what a single officer tried to do, but in a public announcement to the American military (the _entire _military, not just my own navy in the Pacific), I stated that no amount of military decorations, ranks, or awards could, in my eyes, cover up the disgusting attitude of racism that so many of my "fellow Americans" held towards me and all people of color serving in the United States military, because it wasn't just the Japanese Americans like me who were suffering from discrimination, but the boys in black, who've been around for way longer than my own kind have, also were getting the short end of the stick like they always did. In a statement that I would later find out was printed in newspapers across the States like wildfire, I declared,

"If I need to purge an entire division of naval officers to end this nation's unbearable amount of racial discrimination just as how my family and thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans were deported from our homes during the war, then so be it."

Naturally, this got me a whole slew of enemies, but it gained me even more allies, and my position would never again be threatened by my own comrades or countrymen.

Shoukaku gave birth to our first child, Hinotori Tomoya (we also gave him an English name, Marcus), on November 7th, 1946, after a perfectly normal pregnancy. I still get chills to this day knowing that Tomoya was born so close to the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, and he instantly became popular with the USAF and JMSDF girls, who were entranced by the sight of Shoukaku, a ship girl like themselves, having a baby. With their cooperation, I didn't have to constantly worry about if someone in the shadows would try to kidnap or kill my own son, and it certainly felt strange having a child of my own at a mere sixteen years of age. Sweet sixteen? Perhaps.

For the next two years until 1948, Shoukaku, Tomoya, and I lived in various ports around Japan, wherever I was needed to train newly constructed ship girls or to attend Occupation meetings and respond to any emergency calls against possible Russian threats in the Pacific, none of which actually turned out to become anything major. (The Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf was the only major conflict thus far in the Pacific against the Communists.) I sometimes had to travel out of the country and leave my new family behind to visit West Europe to review their ship girl fleets, since I was unanimously determined to be the most talented and able fleet personnel commander available - after all, I was the first one to command a fleet made of ship girls. In my Europe tour during the summer of 1947, I reviewed the Royal Girls, which was very fun and a good time, for all of the Royal Girls who survived the war met up with me, and after review, we all went out and had ourselves a jolly good time with their British commanders, all of whom were good men. I then visited and reviewed the La Royale, the nickname for the French ship girl fleet, who were constructed with the help of the British scientists. The French ship girls treated me like a god, like I was good enough to be the next King Louis XIV. It was a bit...unnerving, the sheer amount of holy respect they gave me, but I dealt with it. Then I reviewed the Deutsche Marine and reunited with good ol' Bismarck, Prinz Eugen, Z1, and Z3, and the German ship girls were super excited to see me, because those four who were with me in Japan had told the new German girls all about me and how much of a superb commander I was. I'm sure they just overexaggerated things.

Finally, when it seemed that the Communist engine in the USSR was finally showing its flaws through Russia's failing economy and weakening national morale because of all the purges and political instability following Stalin's assassination and the consequent chain-assassinations of his successors, President Truman gave me permission to finally head back to the States so that I could try to find Paps and Takahisa and learn what happened to them, if they were even still alive. Shoukaku, Tomoya, and I were flown to Zamperini Field, now known as Torrance Airport, and ironically, with the help of the FBI, I managed to learn that Paps and Takahisa had taken a bus back to the same house we moved into when we had first come to America from Japan and was living there ever since. We drove up to their doorstep, flanked by FBI agents and Secret Service, on the sunny afternoon of July 15th, 1948, about three weeks after my eighteenth birthday.

Seeing Paps and Takahisa for the first time in three years was the only thing that's ever made me cry like a little bitch. My younger brother had grown up so damn much - my only vivid memory before then was him being a stupid idiot running around Camp Manzanar chasing random tumbleweeds as they rolled across the campus. Paps looked terribly aged, as I kind of expected, sadly, but they were doing fine. I introduced them to Shoukaku, my fiance, with whom I'd already had a child, Tomoya. Paps' mind was blown all over the walls of our house when he realized that Shoukaku was going to be my wife. He just gave me a pat on my back and told me,

"Yoshihisa, you sure scored big like your Pappy."

I knew what he meant by that. Paps told me when we were younger that Paps never deserved such a beautiful- wife like our mother, Kuro, and that fortune alone had blessed him with someone like her. Given how the past few years of my life went at the point, I wasn't in a position to argue that. I don't really know quite exactly how things turned out like this. The past couple years were hard and tough, sure, but I didn't expect things to end...dare I say it, _happily._

It was like it was too good to be true. Having a healthy son at the mere age of sixteen, having a beautiful wife like Shoukaku at my side who's saved my life more than once, and knowing that my father and brother had survived Manzanar and rebuilt their lives on their own while I was away -

The only thing that still nipped at all of our hearts was Mom's absence. If only she'd survived, too, it would've been the perfect fairy tale. But life is never a fairy tale, and we'd all by then accepted Mom's death.

Paps showed me and Shoukaku to the backyard, where he and Takahisa had reburied Mom's ashes. They'd dug the little tinderbox that holds her ashes from her grave at Manzanar on the last day they spent there and carried it with them back home so that at least her remains to rest in piece forever, basking in the soothing sunlight of the Peninsula that she grew to love but tragically couldn't enjoy for more than a few years at most. When I saw her grave, I took off my Admiral's naval hat, hung it on the small grave marker that Paps and Takahisa had erected, and saluted, announcing my return and apologizing out loud that I wasn't able to make it back sooner to be part of her burial.

That hat's still hanging there to this day, by the way.

Shoukaku, Tomoya, and I spent a few months there on military leave, catching up with Paps and my brother Takahisa. They told me everything they'd had to go through following their return from Manzanar: first off, the American soldiers had _forced _the Japanese-American interns to leave the camp, just like how they'd forced us to leave our homes to begin with, which is totally fucking absurd. Paps remembered sadly how there were lots of interns there at Manzanar who wanted to stay sheerly because of the fact that they had nowhere else to go, but he'd heard that the military eventually forced them out anyway. He and Takahisa had been given about $25 to make their own journey back to our home here overlooking the Golden Cove, and they'd come back to find the house busted in, vandalized, smashed, and just utterly wrecked. Paps and Takahisa showed me the places on the walls where they'd slapped graffiti on the walls, saying things like "Japs not welcome anymore", "The only good Jap is a dead one", and "Go back to your country, yellow freaks". So Paps and my brother, just the two of them, cleaned up this place from scratch. Takahisa quit school at just ten years old to work as a librarian' assistant at a library that had recently opened just before they'd returned home, about a twenty-minute bike ride from the house. Paps himself began working multiple part-time jobs at luxury restaurants and parks until he managed to secure himself a cartoonist's job for the Los Angeles Times, which finally helped stabilize their financial situation and allowed Takahisa to finally resume school after a year or two of homeschooling.

In turn, I explained my story with Shoukaku to Paps and Takahisa. I couldn't tell them a lot of things at the time because such info was classified still, but later, once the classification levels were lifted, I filled in the missing details for them. Shoukaku became a surrogate mother for my younger brother, who's five years younger than me.

Shoukaku and I were finally married on July 31st, 1948, Mom's birthday, in the backyard of our home overlooking the Golden Cove, so that Mom's ashes could watch us get married from the grave. The fact that Mom's birthday just so happened to be very soon to the day that I finally reunited with my family again for the first time after three years still is so unbelievable to me. It's like a movie script, like something set up so perfectly you can't find it outside of a book. But every time I say that, it seems like something, or someone, is out there, making sure things line up in such a way that it leaves a satisfied tingle in everyone's hearts.

We stayed there until the start of November, and Shoukaku and I entrusted our son Tomoya to my family on the Peninsula as we returned to active duty in Japan. The USAF and the JMSDF girls were bummed by the fact that we didn't bring Tomoya with us, since many of them had grown very close to my son. Little did they or I know at the time we returned from our honeymoon that a second one was already on her way.

For four more years until the winter of 1952, I served as the head of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, Task Force 80, and the Pacific USAF. That four-year period was a clusterfuck of a four-year period: the USSR got sold the secrets of the Yamato Cannon WMD _again _by American defectors looking to make some quick cash, so that was great. While we never had to fight the Russian Spetsnaz straight up again like we did at the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, we did discover secret shipping lanes of the Spetsnaz running right down into North Korea and intercepted them, and funnily enough, we captured Verniy, the first Spetsnaz remodeled from the former Shin-Kantai Hibiki. It was a really strange moment when I introduced our prisoner Verniy to the new JMSDF Hibiki, and they both sensed that they were the same person, sort of. It was awkward at first, but then eventually they opened up to each other and became good friends, and Hibiki was crying the night we arranged a POW exchange with the Russians to deliver Verniy back to them in exchange for one of our U-2 spy plane pilots who got captured after Russian SAM sites shot down his plane over Siberia. Shoukaku gave birth to two more children, both daughters, Hinotori Zuikaku (named after none other than Shoukaku's ship sister, English name Rebecca) and Hinotori Hiroshiko (named in honor of Shoukaku's last captain of her warship counterpart during the war, English name Amelia) during that time as well, and they, too, were doted on heavily by the ship girls.

We finally returned back home to the Peninsula once the United States and the USSR, the two strongest nations in the world, signed the SALT I agreements at the end of 1952 specifically to limit the production of Yamato Cannons being built for deployment on ship girls' equipment, and I retired from active duty to begin raising my family of the three best children in the world and the universe's most beautiful wife. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could breathe without having to feel like something was holding my chest down. Shoukaku was really eager to further expand our family, much to my chagrin, and within another two years of returning back to the States, she gave birth to twins, both sons (Hinotori Shunsuke, English name Kenny, and Hinotori Rinnosuke, named after Paps, English name Zenny), and a final daughter, Hinotori Zuihou, named after her fellow ship girl Zuihou, whose warship counterpart served alongside her as the First Carrier Division in the war, English name, appropriately, Hope). With our home filled with six kids running around all over the place, Shoukaku and I would sometimes give each other amused looks as though to ask each other what the hell we ended up doing to ourselves. Takahisa was the big older brother to everyone, being their uncle, and Paps was quite happy with our children, since the addition of six healthy grandchildren was more than enough to make up for the loss of his own wife, my mother.

The only sad part about this happy story of mine is that we discovered that because of Shoukaku's construction as a ship girl, she hardly ever aged. By the time I was recalled back to active duty in September 1962 in response to the Cuban Fleet Crisis, I was thirty-two years old, and Shoukaku looked practically the exact same as I'd met her on July 17th, 1945. I met with several of the former Manhattan Project scientists, who've since retired from their military backgrounds and were teaching in prestigious American universities across the nation or pursuing some other educational or research-related lines of work, and they recalled that when they studied the blueprints of the Shin-Kantai that Shoukaku gave them through me, they weren't sure if the ship girls would ever age or not. They could, for all we know, live forever, so long as they're not killed in wartime. And if they ever did eventually die, their lifespans were for sure at least some ten times longer than an average human's. Before I left my home again to lead the combined Atlantic USAF, Royal Guard Navy, La Royale, and Deutsche Marine NATO fleet against the Russian Spetsnaz fleet that had managed to station itself at Cuba so that they could aim their own Yamato guns towards the American East Coast, I spoke with my wife Shoukaku quietly about the matter. It was something that she, too, had been aware of from the very beginning, when she first decided that she would become my wife, but she had ignored it as an issue she could deal with later. But that later was now. I told her that we'd have to explain to our children that most likely, their mother was going to outlive not only me and them, but our grandchildren and however many generations that will follow in the future. Before we sat our children down to talk to them about the matter, Shoukaku promised me that she would take responsibility by taking care of our family for however many generations she would live through after our children and I were long gone.

But that's all in the past now.

I'm reading the Los Angeles Times newspaper, the morning edition of Wednesday, July 17th, 1963, on the couch, reading about the finalization of the SALT II agreements signed by both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Having drawn manga for the vast majority of his life, Paps is in his study, completing the final manuscript of a side manga he's been working on and plans to publish under a penname. My younger brother, Takahisa, has married a Japanese-American girl whom he'd met at Manzanar after I left in 1945 and reunited with a few years ago and moved out of the house to build a house right next to ours, and we've all helped with building the house and finished it just last month.

Our children are away at school, without fear of being segregated or picked on because of the fact that they're Japanese. Tomoya, Zuikaku, Hiroshiko, Shunsuke, Rinnosuke, and Zuihou are growing up wonderfully, living out their childhoods like normal children ought to, instead of wasting it away first in an internment camp and then in the military. I may still be really bitter about how my life has gone, but whenever I try to make myself regurgitate that old bitterness, the sweetness of the smiles on my children as they run around the house making mischief and making my life and my wife's life hell balances it all out so that I can't really feel angry at the past anymore. To be angry at how my life turned out would mean that I would also have to deny my own children their own lives, and I can't bring myself to do that.

The living room sliding doors are open, letting in a nice ocean breeze into our house. I glance outside, and the Admiral's hat that I put on Mom's grave marker is still there, drifting lazily with the breeze. Mom is still watching over me, and that's nice to know.

Shoukaku comes in from the kitchen with a small tray of beautifully carved apples and two cups of cherry blossom tea. It's become one of her favorite hobbies to practice carving all sorts of interesting designs into the skin of apple slices, and she's gotten amazingly good at it.

She hands me a cup of cherry blossom tea, and she sits down next to me on the couch and snuggles herself next to me. I do the same with her, resting my cheek against the top of her beloved red hairband that she's worn all this time ever since I met her.

"Your sister's coming to visit next week, isn't she?" I ask. "We should really plan out where we ought to go for a weekend trip or something. You heard the kids when we told them their aunt was coming to visit, they nearly went mad and tore down the back wall."

We both burst into chuckles at the memory.

"We can let the kids decide for once," my wife says sweetly. "I know they've got some good ideas of their own."

"You sure? We're going to have to deal with six back-to-back trips to Disneyland, then."

We again chuckle together.

"It's fine, so long as the children are having fun," Shoukaku giggles. We drink our tea, and Shoukaku playfully feeds me some apple slices. The apple juice that seeps into my teeth and my tongue reminds me that today is a special day.

"Shoukaku," I say as I work to swallow the food in my mouth to talk, and my wife looks at me with that smile of hers that can outshine the sun.

"Yes, honey?"

"I don't think I've ever said this in the eighteen years we've been together, but..."

Shoukaku tilts her head.

"What? What did you never say?"

I grin at her.

"Thanks for being my wife, Shoukaku."

And with that, I put a quiet kiss on her forehead.

Not even the blushes I saw on her face when we were having night battles could match the one on her face right now.

"So you remembered..." she finally gets herself to speak.

"For once, yeah. Sorry that...I never remembered before. Now that everything's over and done with, I've had the luxury to take the days one at a time."

Shoukaku shakes her head.

"Thank you, too," she says with her eyes glistening with tears, "for being my husband."

Shoukaku falls asleep in a nap with her head on my shoulder as I continue reading the paper, but I soon put the newspaper away and hold her hand as I, too, close my eyes for quick nap. I can feel our wedding rings rubbing against one another as Shoukaku grasps my hand tightly, the warmth in her hand seeping into mine.

I wonder when it was that I first realized this, that if "hope" doesn't exist in my dictionary, all I have to do is write it back in, so that even if I can't use it, my children can.

But I couldn't've done it alone. Shoukaku was the pen that I needed to write - both in the dictionary and in the history books.


	9. German Consolidation

**A/N:**

**Been some time since I last wrote a one-shot.**

**I was asked to write a noire-style first person narrative. It ended up as something...slightly different.**

**I've found that I have a lot of fun formulating alternate histories. Not revisionist history, but alternate histories, exploring the what-ifs and if-thats that can happen. Being a history major in college is mostly to blame for that.**

**Because I had forsaken Shoukaku in place of Maya in the fifth story, I put her in the previous one.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Admiral! _Admiral!_ Oh, _um gottes willen,_ you aren't paying attention!"

Bismarck, the German transfer battleship, smacks her Admiral on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

"Ah...oh, shit, sorry...dozed off..." the Admiral says hastily, readjusting his naval officer's hat on his head and sitting back up in his chair. "Sorry, I...had a bit of a rough night yesterday, what'd I miss?"

Bismarck, narrowing her pure blue eyes at her Admiral, puts her firm hands on her wide hips.

"Don't tell me you were fooling around with Eugen again? _Gottverdammte_, just marry her already if she's distracting you so much!"

"No, wait, listen, Bisko, you don't - ow!"

Bismarck throws her rolled-up newspaper at the Admiral, and it smacks him end-first against his forehead.

_"Call me 'Bisko' one more time, Admiral! I dare you! I dare you, arschgeige!" _Bismarck yells, her cheeks flushing terribly. "I hate it when people call me that! It's _your _fault this entire naval district has come to call me nothing but 'Bisko, Bisko, Bisko'! Bisko this, Bisko that! _Der schwanz!"_

"Erm, Bismarck-sama, I don't understand German, so please, don't constantly be throwing German insults at me, I won't understand them..."

Bismarck stands straight again, suddenly pleased with hearing a suitable honorific for her name.

"Then from the beginning of my report before you dozed off," Bismarck, reinvigorated, starts her report again. "We need more Type 3 shells, Instant Repair Buckets, Bauxite, and Steel. Akagi and Kaga are still docking, Sendai is still screaming 'Yasen, Yasen' in the light cruiser dormitories, Jun'you is still in bed due to a hangover from yesterday's drinking party, Tenryuu is still taking care of the Sixth Destroyer Division, Yuubari is requesting more scrap metal to produce experimental weapons, the submarines have returned from their 9003rd sortie to Orel Sea, Kongou is having withdrawal symptoms from the lack of black tea supplies, Aoba has been reprimanded on 52 accounts of paparazzi photo-taking, Atago has been practicing splitting watermelons with her - "

"OKAY, STOP!" the Admiral yells out, flailing his arms out in front. "Bismarck, you - you didn't need to tell me all that! I just want the important bits!"

Bismarck narrows her eyes again at her Admiral.

"_Was sagen sie da? _Was I not reporting to you the important aspects of this base?"

"Yeah, but - no, no, you weren't! That's all crap I always hear! Like, what's different for today? Like, did the girls find a new ship girl out there? Or maybe a new LSC construction or new prototype weapon development? That's the kind of stuff you need to report to me as a secretary ship!"

Bismarck pulls on a face of disappointment.

"Are you saying that I didn't do my job correctly?" Bismarck says disdainfully. "That's not possible, I always get my work done properly!"

"No, no..." the Admiral shakes his head and buries his face into his hands tiredly, "it's not that you're doing your job wrong, you're just not telling me things that I want to know! Everything you've told me so far, I don't really care about!"

Bismarck, hit by the Admiral's words, takes a small step backwards.

"Y-You don't..." Bismarck stutters, feeling insulted by the Admiral's choice of words, "you don't...care about my work...?"

The Admiral takes his face off his hands, realizing that his words weren't phrased properly.

"No! No, not that! I didn't mean it that way! It's not that I don't care about what you're doing for me, it's that there can be improvements that you can make to make your reports more informative. That's what I'm trying to say."

"Oh..._was vom Teufel_, you scared me!" Bismarck sighs with relief. "Then...then what should I do to improve?"

"Like I said..." the Admiral sighs, adjusting his tie, "don't report what everyone already knows. Anything that's mundane or doesn't have very pressing relevance can be ignored. Things like new ship girl constructions or discoveries, new resource shipments found from sorties and expeditions, battle reports, things like that. If you think you'll have trouble, just ask Kongou for help."

"Kongou? That British_ b__loede kuh?_ Why should I go to _her _for consultation regarding this position?" Bismarck asks with very apparent disgust in her voice.

"Because she was my previous secretary ship, that's why. And I know you two don't have the best of relationships, and I know Kongou's kinda in a bad mood right now since we don't have any black tea at base at the moment, but still, try to work something out - "

Then, the doors to the Admiral's office burst open.

"Admiral! Admiral, a new communique from Tokyo headquarters has arrived!" a cheerful, bouncy voice fills the Admiral's ears sweetly, and in dashes Prinz Eugen, the German Admiral Hipper-Class heavy cruiser whom the Admiral has recently acquired. She dashes past Bismarck, who quickly steps out of her way in reflex and places a piece of paper in front of the Admiral on his desk. "Look, look! My kanji isn't too great right now, but it says something about a new German ship girl we can get soon!"

"H-Hey, Eugen, where are your manners? I was speaking with the Admiral first!" Bismarck says indignantly. Hearing Bismarck's voice, Prinz Eugen suddenly spins around, her blonde locks spinning with her, and squeals at the sight of her beloved battleship sister.

"_Schwesterherz!_" Prinz Eugen squeals, instantly burying her face into Bismarck's ample battleship-class ballast tanks. "Er, I should say, Onee-sama, as the Japanese would say. How are you doing this morning? Oh, oh! Did you get the news?" Prinz Eugen spins back around, grabs the communique off the Admiral's desk, and nearly shoves the paper into Bismarck's face with excitement. "We're supposedly due for another German ship girl! A submarine this time! Isn't that _wunderbar?"_

"_Ja, ja_, but my dear Eugen, you see, the Admiral is instructing me in the ways of the secretary ship position, so I would like it if you did not barge in like this without prior announcement..."

Prinz Eugen gasps, putting both her hands over her mouth and taking a step back.

"_Oh nein! _I'm - I'm so sorry, s_chwesterherz! _I was - I was simply carried away by the sudden news...please, g-go ahead..."

Flailing nervously, Prinz Eugen steps aside to let her beloved battleship sister-at-arms continue to speak with the Admiral.

"_E-Ein..._" Bismarck stutters nervously, having forgotten where her conversation with the Admiral had been cut off at. "Where...what we were talking about again...?"

The Admiral shrugs. "Beats me, I forgot too. Eugen, hand me that communique, I didn't see it in full detail just yet. I am interested in another submarine to help the Orel Sea squadron..."

Prinz Eugen bounces forward eagerly as always to hand him the paper, and Bismarck, having remembered where she'd left off, pats the bottom of her fist against her palm.

"Right! Um, Admiral, we left off at why I should go see Kongou for consultation about the position of secretary ship."

"Oh yeah..." the Admiral scans the communique without glancing up at Bismarck, "so, go talk to her if you want to improve your work on being secretary ship."

"And I said that I refuse to do so! Kongou is an ignorant _verdammt Arschlöcher! _And you know this, Admiral!"

"While I have no idea what you just called Kongou, Bismarck, I'll just assume you called her some insult, so I say to you, bullshit. Get along for God's sake, why don't you. Half the time whenever I want to sortie you with the rest of the battleships, I can't because I know you two'll come back both heavily damaged 'cause one of you thought it was funny to friendly fire each other in the middle of combat and make me have to waste time and resources getting the both of you back up to par. And honestly, I'm a bit annoyed by that. I'm not annoyed by a lot of things. I can let lots of things slide." The Admiral sighs and looks up at Bismarck from Prinz Eugen's communique. "But your relationship with Kongou has got to improve. This isn't just a request. It's an order."

Bismarck frowns angrily, clenching her hands.

"Don't make it sound as though this is all my fault, Admiral!" Bismarck whines. "Alright, I shall admit my shortcomings and my less-than-admirable deeds done for the sake of rivalry. But Kongou has had her own fair share of - "

The Admiral raises his hand.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it. I was going to say that I was going to go talk to Kongou as well once we get some black tea to sate her frickin' addiction," the Admiral sighs again. "And even though I did tell you this, I'm confident that you can amend your relationship with Kongou. I mean, everyone in the fleet gets along just fine with the rest of your German comrades, and vice versa. You get along just fine with just about everyone else, too. And yes, yes, I get that there's this whole Germany-Britain thing going on. But just leave that aside for once, will you? I'm sure you can do it."

The Admiral then turns to Prinz Eugen.

"Eugen, according to this communique, the timeframe during which we can acquire U-511 starts very soon - this late afternoon, in fact. We're gonna give her a proper German welcome. Have Lebe and Max prepare for a sortie, along with Destroyer Division 6 and the Yasen Baka - she'll come in handy if you girls get caught up in a night battle along the way."

Prinz Eugen snaps to a salute.

"_Jawohl!"_

"Also, I'm told that we also received quite a few shipments of _Kinderbier - _hopefully I said that right, but feel free to share them with the rest of the fleet. It's non-alcoholic, right?"

Nodding eagerly, easily excited by this piece of news, Prinz Eugen starts bouncing up and down at the mention of Kinderbier.

"_Ja, ja! _It's, um, it's 'kid's beer' in Japanese! I think! And yes, it's not alcoholic! None at all!"

"Good, good...I don't want something like yesterday to end up happening again, where _all of you nearly drank yourselves silly at dinner for no reason..."_

"W-Waaaaahh, A-Admiral, d-d-don't mention that, I'm really soorrryyyyyy...!"

Prinz Eugen immediately dashes over to the Admiral's side and starts slapping him on the shoulder to get him to shut up.

"Eugen, that was because you thought you could handle alcohol like us s_chlachtschiffe _can," Bismarck sighs, raising a hand matter-of-factly with the other hand on her hip. "I'm fine with you calling me s_chwesterherz _and all, but please don't forget you are only a heavy cruiser."

Prinz Eugen pouts back at Bismarck. "Admiral, please do something about my s_chwesterherz, _she's clearly starting to bully me," Eugen says with puckered lips, pointing over at Bismarck.

"Wh-Wha - !? I wasn't even - "

"Very well!" the Admiral suddenly jumps up from his chair and glares straight at Bismarck's eyes. "Bismarck!"

"Y-Yes?!" Bismarck, surprised by her Admiral making sudden movements, which is extremely rare, takes an instinctive step back, her eyes fixated by the intense stare of her Admiral.

"In accordance with my fondness for the German Heavy Cruiser by the name of Prinz Eugen and her holy, untainted torpedo bulges - "

_"Du verdammter perverser! _What the hell are you even saying!?"

" - I must administer the proper punishment for your mistreatment of Purin-chan."

"W-Who are you calling 'Purin-chan'!? I'm not a pudding, you know!"

"Says the girl who told me to eat her up while drink yesterday, I don't wanna hear it from you! Anyway! Bismarck, I shall now announce your punishment!"

_"THIS IS INJUSTICE! CLEAR ABUSE OF ADMIRALTY AND MILITARY POWER! I SHALL DISPATCH THE LOCAL MILITARY POLICE TO - "_

"Your punishment is to give Purin-chan a hug!" the Admiral declares, very, very anti-climatically. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen both stare at their Admiral with blank faces.

"..._was?_" Bismarck asks, as her brain has blown a fuse trying to follow the Admiral's train of thought.

But Prinz Eugen is all for it.

"_Hurraaaaaaaaaa! _I get to hug _Schwesterherz!" _Prinz Eugen cries, and without letting Bismarck react, she engages in a high-speed collision with her battleship sister and sinks her to the ground with her.

"E-Eugen!? Hey - hey, get off! You do this every day and night to me anyway! Eugen! _Eugeeeeeennnnn! ! ! !"_

Bismarck looks up at the Admiral, who is sitting back down in his chair, having picked up his pen and begun writing on Eugen's communique.

"A-Admiral! Assist me, _verdammt! _Your - your precious German battleship is sinking! She is being sunk, I say!"

The Admiral glances down at them on the floor of his office.

"If that's how you're sinking, I don't mind seeing how far you two sink," the Admiral says with an evil grin.

_**"ADMIRAAAAAAAALLLL! ! ! !"**_


	10. Firebirds 2

**A/N:**

**I admit to knowing absolutely no German or having any knowledge of it, and I will freely admit to have Googled many German phrases. I apologize if I have done the German language an incredible disservice with the last entry.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

_"Les' buuuuuuuuurn!"_

Out on the training waters of Yokosuka Naval Station, CL-46, or the U.S.S. Phoenix, splits the water in half on her all-terrain boots, laughing murderously while skiing towards the buoys on which the practice targets are installed. She takes a glance over her left shoulder, over the heavy machinery that supports her 6-inch multi-purpose perdition turrets, as her creamy vanilla hair flies in the high-speed winds behind her like a flag on the mast of a ship.

"C'mon, Hibiki! Show me that'cher title ain't jus' for show!" Phoenix encourages with a loud, boisterous, and confident call. "Everything I taught you these last two days - let's see what'cha got!"

Hibiki, the destroyer with the same name as their American guest counterpart, reaches up to her cap and yanks it down over her her face, only leaving the lower half of her face visible, but the flames of anticipation that have been stoked within her eyes cannot be contained simply by being obscured by the visor of a cap.

"Well then...let's do this."

The small, delicate hands of the Japanese destroyer simmer quickly into flames, instead of bursting into flames as do Phoenix's own hands. In addition, the flames are no longer red on the hands of Hibiki, but white in the color of snow.

"Your guns ready for this?" Phoenix calls again as the two ship girls approach the first target of their training course. Hibiki nods in confirmation, and Phoenix sets her eyes back on the target buoy. "Just like we practiced! Here we go!"

There are a total of sixty-four target buoys set up for the pair of phoenixes in the training waters. Phoenix initiates first, and her first 6-inch barrel blasts away first in a fiery report of smoldering cannon smoke to score a perfect hit, disintegrating the tall target buoy floating about in the small waves of the Yokosuka Naval Station pier. Hibiki, having doubled up on 12.7cm twin mount cannons for this practice course, immediately follows up Phoenix's first shot and fires at the second target, and Hibiki's first cannon barrel emits a flaming white pillar of gunpowder exhaust. Leaving behind a white contour line that streaks across the harbor's waters and mingling with Phoenix's red trajectory smoke, Hibiki's first shot crushes the second target in a fist of snowy fire.

Phoenix's 6-inch turrets track each of her assigned target buoys, belching round after round like an organ gun as she and Hibiki glide deftly around the destroyed buoys to advance and reach the next sets of targets. Hibiki's 12.7cm guns also behave similarly, and in this fashion, by alternating precise and accurate artillery fire, the two seaborne phoenixes set the first ten target buoy ablaze and leave nothing but ashes.

After expending all their first loaded shots, because the two ship girls are breezing through the course so speedily, neither Phoenix's weapons nor Hibiki's are able to reload quickly enough to destroy the next sets of targets. So instead, Phoenix whips out her M2-A1 Flamethrower from her belt holster and surges even faster towards her next targets.

_"Awwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"_

Screaming with fiery delight, Phoenix sets both her targets and her own passionate red eyes ablaze with infernal excitement. The muzzle of her weapon easily lives up to its name, throwing plumes of fire like a water hose all over her targets, and Phoenix screams uncontrollably with inflamed satisfaction of a pyromaniac doing what she does best, wielding her steel thrower of flames with one arm and dousing everything with fire. But she doesn't let her crazed desire to watch the world burn impede the progress that she and Hibiki are making and instead continues to run through the course, setting all the targets she can reach on fire quickly to move on to the next.

When Phoenix first enters her pyromaniacal rampage, Hibiki, meanwhile, dashes ahead of Phoenix, heading for a cluster of targets that Phoenix has indicated beforehand. She puts herself within melee range of the targets, and Hibiki lashes out with her hands, and like sharp, fiery talons, her small hands that have been set ablaze with white phoenix fire smash the targets into pieces, and the fire that catches them in the air from her hands immolates them to dust and ash, reducing the targets to nanoparticles even before the pieces can hit the water. With her white hands slashing like the claws of a phoenix at all the targets she can reach, Hibiki puts up a mesmerizing light show of white on blue under the sunny blue morning sky, tearing through her targets with an ice-cold composure that clashes with the fiery maniacal passion of her fellow Phoenix.

And like this, the two ship girls alternate attacks, firing their cannon barrels when they have reloaded and destroying the targets by hand if needed, and the target buoys are erased faster than the falling of dominoes in a domino track. The final target buoy, because of the rocking of the waves, is at a hard angle for Phoenix to shoot without making more ordinance calculations, so Phoenix points her guns at Hibiki instead.

"Hibiki! Catch!"

Hibiki glances at Phoenix, and as soon as she sees Phoenix angling her guns at her, Hibiki grabs the heavy anchor that is hanging behind her on her own belt. Normally, this anchor weighs enough to help keep her in place while out at sea, but with her newly awakened phoenix power, Hibiki hardly feels its weight. As Phoenix catapults a 6-inch shell at her, Hibiki raises her anchor with two hands and swings, crunching the shell just at the perfect angle to deflect it towards the last target, which disappears in one final explosion of leaded phoenix fire that vaporizes everything it touches - target, buoy, water, air, and all.

A distant ringing of a shrill bell from the naval station signals the end of the training course, and Hibiki, breathing laboriously but steadily from the effort, wipes her mouth with the back of her sleeve as she still grips the shaft of her anchor.

"Hibikiiiiii, that was amaziiiiinnnnnggg!"

Phoenix gives Hibiki no time for rest, pummeling into her at full ramming speed to catch the destroyer in her arms. Caught totally unawares by this, Hibiki shrieks in surprise as her head smushes into Phoenix's leather-jacketed bosom, thus escaping the possibility of incurring heavy damage due to ramming. Phoenix seems to be blissfully unaware of this, however, as she proceeds straight from a big face-smothering hug with her chest to spinning the poor destroyer 'round and 'round by her hands. The white fire that is still burning on Hibiki's hands don't seem to be hurting Phoenix's hands at all, though.

"That was exactly twenty-three seconds! It's the base's record!" Phoenix cheers loudly, laughing happily. "See? I _told'ja _I'd turn you into a fine phoenix! Let's fuckin' _go_, lad!"

Hibiki tries to say something, but the constant spinning is disorienting her too much for her to speak properly, so by the time Phoenix finally stops and puts Hibiki back down on the water, Hibiki nearly capsizes onto her side from the dizziness. Phoenix helps her upright and sails back with her to the pier, where Hibiki's fellow class destroyers jump off the pier onto the water to go greet Hibiki and congratulate her.

"That was so cool, Hibiki-chan!" Ikazuchi bursts out, squeezing Hibiki in her own arms too. "All that training you did with Phoenix-san paid off!"

"Y-You even got the base record! Commander said so!" Inazuma also adds. "You did really well, Hibiki-chan!"

"It's only proper for a lady like me to congratulate her younger sister," Akatsuki says, approaching Hibiki with crossed arms but reaching out to pat Hibiki's head. "S-So it's only natural for me to do this!"

While the Sixth Destroyer Division is showering Hibiki with a flood of praise, Admiral Nishimura beckons to Phoenix to dock, so Phoenix climbs onto the pier and heads to the Admiral, her guns and flamethrower still trailing murky smoke as she walks. As usual, Yamashirou, Shigure, and Michishio, the three members of the Nishimura Fleet who still do not fully trust in their new American comrade-at-arms, closely flank their Admiral.

"Excellent work, Phoenix. I'm sure you probably already know this by now, but you just broke the record for that course," Admiral Nishimura gives Phoenix a congratulatory grin. "Very well done, both you and Hibiki."

Phoenix pops a big, victorious grin of her own and flashes the victory hand gesture. "Thanks, ya. I knew we could pull it off together." However, at the sight of the three Japanese ship girls surrounding their Admiral, Phoenix pouts a bit. "Y'all _still _don't like me? I mean, sheesh, I know we have our rivalries, but come _on, _ain't this takin' it a bit too far? Why can't we all jus' be friends, yeah?"

"Well, seeing you laughin' your butt off out there while torching those target buoys, I don't know if anyone would even _want _to be friends with someone like you," Michishio growls at Phoenix.

"On top of which, you Americans sure seem to love living in the present, don't you?" Yamashirou also berates Phoenix. "You always love to put the past behind you so easily without much of a second thought! I would like to remind you that this is not how things are here! We do not flippantly cast aside our pasts in pursuit of immediate niceties just so we can 'be friends'! We cannot be allies with you, much less 'friends' with you, even if we may no longer necessarily be enemies!"

The Admiral tries to stop Yamashirou mid-sentence, but Yamashirou refuses to be silenced. Phoenix, for her own part, simply sneers at Yamashirou condescendingly.

"Oh ho? Still salty 'bout how I was the one who ended up sinkin' you back then, huh?" Phoenix leers at Yamashirou with brutal verbal jabs. "Then if history's so important to you, why don't'cha come at me, gal? Think you can beat me this time 'round? Huh? C'mon, bitch, let's see it! One on one, you and me, right now! Let's go! Come at me!"

"Girls, girls! That's enough!" Admiral Nishimura, fed up with their constant bickering every time they meet, pries the ship girls apart before they can lay their hands on one another. "How many times has this been now? For God's sake, we're all part of the same fleet now, for now, anyway, so start acting like it! Every time you two talk, for the past two days, it always devolves into some kind of fight! Honestly, I don't want to have to decommission either of you on grounds of insubordination! Am I clear?"

Phoenix puckers up her lips, more bummed out at a missed opportunity for a fight than ashamed, and she disengages from the potential conflict, backing up with her hands behind her head. Yamashirou obeys her Admiral, glaring at the American ship girl with a fierce hate in her eyes.

"Phoenix-san," Shigure says quietly, gazing down at Phoenix's feet as she speaks, "while we are honored to have you here as a guest comrade, I would like to ask you to refrain from speaking such threatening words to any one of us, joking or not. I think...it is best for everyone involved."

Phoenix glances down at Shigure.

"That sounds like a challenge more 'n anythin', but whatever. Yeah, I get it already, don't fight anyone here..." Phoenix rolls her eyes casually. "But seriously, I do want a friendly fight sometime, a spar or anything. We've been doin' nothin' but training runs this whole time! Back at San Diego Port, I used to go 1v3 against Maury, Shaw, and Mahan all the time! Just training ain't gonna be enough, where's the _real _fightin' at? That's what I wanna know!"

"You'll receive your first assignment soon enough," Admiral Nishimura reassures Phoenix. "We're due for a fleet expedition into Abyssal waters, anyway. So just wait until then and try not to cause any fights here."

Phoenix turns on her heel, still with her hands behind her head. "Sure, sure..."

Hibiki and her ship sisters, by this time, have come ashore onto the pier, and Hibiki trots up to Phoenix. Forgetting her whole conversation with the Admiral and the other ship girls, Phoenix gives Hibiki a big smile and swoops her up in her arms.

"Ooooh, you're growin' up so fast, ain't'cha, lil' birdie?" Phoenix coos, pinching Hibiki's cheek lightly and shaking it, and instead of being annoyed as she usually becomes when someone else does it to her, Hibiki giggles in amusement as Phoenix walks back to base with the other Akatsuki-Class destroyers in tow.

Admiral Nishimura turns to Shigure, Yamashirou, and Michishio.

"Look, I know Phoenix isn't the best American ship girl we could've gotten, but it's not like I'm asking you to specifically make up for what happened during the war and be BFF's or something," he scolds. "But the least you can do is to try not to stir up any trouble. I'm looking at you specifically, Yamashirou." The battleship simply crosses her arms and looks away, refusing to listen. "It's not like Phoenix was supposed to be deployed here indefinitely; with due time she will return back to her home port. We didn't have any trouble when the British ship girls came to visit on military excursion; why can't you give Phoenix the same treatment?"

"You can't compare the British to the Americans, so don't even try," Michishio sputters angrily. "At least the British girls were nice and polite. Phoenix always acts like she's got something to prove. I can't stand her."

The Admiral just shrugs. "And so what if she does? You girls were the same way, too, when I received you all under my command. In fact, Phoenix gave Hibiki powers that we didn't even know she could have, didn't she? She gets along so well with Hibiki and the others, why can't the rest of you do the same?"

Yamashirou clicks her tongue loudly and obnoxiously. "What I want to know is how she even knew Hibiki could do something like that. None of us knew that Hibiki could manipulate fire - that's the first time anyone's heard of a Japanese ship girl being able to use physical powers outside of her conventional weaponry. I bet Phoenix and the American ship girls know something about us that we don't."

"Yamashirou-san, Phoenix has stated that the American ship girls are better built than us," Shigure reminds the battleship. "The American fleet was produced more recently, so it is possible that they carry weapons systems that we do not."

"Doesn't mean that they're stronger," Yamashirou snaps back.

"Well, we'll see with our first assignment with Phoenix," the Admiral says, turning to head back to his office. "For all this talk, you girls better not disappoint."


	11. Firebirds 3

Yamashirou is standing in front of Admiral Nishimura on the morning of Phoenix's third day at the Yokosuka Naval Station with her hand on her face.

"Again, sir?" she asks in a bleary tone.

The Admiral sets down his communique on his desk as his secretary Shigure hands him another freshly faxed notice from the Navy Headquarters in Tokyo.

"Yep, you heard me right. Another American destroyer by the name of Johnston - the U.S.S. Johnston." The Admiral runs his hand through his black hair that reaches down to the back of his neck, a bit longer than standard military protocol, but given his rank, he can get away with minor things like hair length. "Don't sweat it, I've made sure that this next guest of ours isn't as hot-headed as Phoenix is...given your history with her..."

"Our history does not matter! What matters is why we are receiving yet another foreign ship girl in our base! Have them reconsider this, please! I was not constructed to fight with our former enemies, especially one that turned out to be the one who sank me in the last war!"

Yamashirou's admiral gives her a funny look.

"Didn't you just say that your history doesn't matter? So why does that bother you?"

"N-Never mind that, just - ugh, whatever!"

Fusou, coming into Admiral Nishimura's office with a platter of tea and Yuudachi close behind in tow with another tray of rice crackers and mizu youkan, sets her cargo down on the front of her admiral's desk.

"Oh? What is the matter, Yamashirou?" Fusou asks with a bit of concern, noticing that her ship sister appears to be somewhat agitated, which usually means that she's heard some news that she doesn't like.

"Ask the Admiral, Fusou-nee-sama!" Yamshirou snaps, but much less harshly. "He must be the one to tell you everything!"

"Well, it's not as dramatic as Yamashirou's making it sound," Nishimura grins a bit, picking up the communique that he's set down to show Fusou. "Shigure just gave me a new communique from HQ, regarding our base's acceptance of another American ship girl."

Fusou looks a bit surprised, but her demeanor demonstrates no partiality towards the matter.

"How unusual. Two guest ship girls in a space of only a few days. Who is our new guest? And how long will be she staying with us?"

"U.S.S. Johnston. She'll be staying here as long as Phoenix will, until our grand naval review for the Emperor." The Admiral looks up at the clock. "And looks like it's time for your late afternoon practice. Let's start heading out, yeah?" Nishimura, standing up, picks up a cube of grape mizu youkan and pops it in his mouth, enjoying the soft grape flavor and the silky, gelatinous texture of the Japanese dessert.

"But it's really late. When's she supposed to get here, poi? And who's gonna receive her?" Yuudachi asks, also wolfing down some youkan as Shigure wipes Yuudachi's mouth with a napkin.

Nishimura taps the side of his desk.

"I sent the Sixth Destroyer Division and Phoenix out there to go get her. Speaking of which, it's really late, I sent them out like three hours ago...why are they so late?"

* * *

"Awwww, just where the heck is she!?" Akatsuki cries, growing heavily impatient, but understandably so. She and her ship sisters of the Sixth Destroyer Division, with their recent addition of their American guest light cruiser Phoenix, have been waiting at the rendezvous point in the middle of the ocean, roughly fifty kilometers from base, for the arrival of their new guest ship girl for nearly an hour and a half when they have been told they don't need to wait for longer than half an hour. "She's late, late, late! It's rude to make a lady like me wait for so darn long! What's with this new girl, huh!?"

"It's also rude for a lady to show her impatience, Akatsuki. She will come," Hibiki advises quietly, and Akatsuki shuts up immediately, pouting to herself because she feels like Hibiki's words have just slapped her across the face.

"No, but like, real talk, where is Johnston, that bitch? She's usually super punctual 'n spartan..." Phoenix mutters, not a fan of standing around and doing nothing for an hour and a half. Her metal flame tails are swinging about in boredom, bursting into flames every once in a while to amuse themselves.

"Um, Phoenix-san..." Inazuma glides over to Phoenix, "can you tell us about...about Johnston-san? I'd like to know...a little bit more about her so that, um, when we meet her..."

"You can be friends with her right away?" Phoenix finishes Inazuma's sentence for her, much to Inazuma's chagrin.

"H-H-Haaaawawawa...I got figured out, nanodesu..." Inazuma blushes and puts her face into her hands.

"Man, Inazuma, you're just so easy to read, is all, don't worry 'bout it," Phoenix, laughing, pats Inazuma's head. "But Johnston...let's see, she's...to be honest, I don't really like her too much..."

Inazuma looks up in distress. "Aw...why don't you like her, Phoenix-san?"

"'Cause she's so strict all the time!" Phoenix pouts too, just like the destroyers. Apparently, spending three days hanging out with Hibiki and her ship sisters has caused Phoenix to pick up some of their more childish tendencies, too. "She's always protocol this, protocol that. She always hounds on everyone else whenever she sees that something's outta line. Even if the most minor and irrelevant thing in the world, she'll still call you out on it. It's so annoying...always about the rules, follow the rules, rules this, rules that..."

"But there's gotta be something good you can say about her, right?" Ikazuchi chimes in. "She's gotta have a fun side to her, right?"

"I wouldn't say she's got a 'fun' side to her, necessarily..." Phoenix twists her lips. "And if she's even got one, she's sure as hell never shown it. But I will say that she takes her work seriously. She's not the kinda person you can just...make friends with, but instead she's the kinda person you want with you in a fight. 'Cause if there's anythin' she takes more seriously than anything, it's fighting. It's all about the job, it's all about the mission. Give her a single 5-inch turret and tell her to patrol the entire Pacific Ocean, and she'll do it."

"A true comrade, then," Hibiki remarks quietly.

"Yeah...I suppose. I don't like her myself, but I've fought with her a couple times before we got transferred here. Lemme tell ya, it's a real treat. She just gets things done. I don't know how else to say it. Well, she _can _get too caught up in the fight, and sometimes she can get off her rocker, but for the most part..."

"So she's a lady, just like me, by the sounds of it!" Akatsuki concludes with eagerness.

"Er...we're all ladies here, aren't we...?" Phoenix looks at Akatsuki oddly.

"Uh, yeah, um, but, but, I mean, as in, ladies! You know, lady!"

Akatsuki tries to perform a curtsy, but she places her feet improperly and loses her balance, almost falling backwards onto her butt on the water, if it isn't for Phoenix grabbing Akatsuki by her turret barrel and lifting her up.

"Hey, hey, careful with that, you didn't do it right," Phoenix says. "Here, here, lemme show you."

Gaping in amazement, Akatsuki is supremely surprised when Phoenix, the last person she's expecting to know how to curtsy, curtsies expertly. Her ship sisters, too, are also taken back by the sight of someone like Phoenix curtsying.

"Wh-Where'd you learn that!?" Akatsuki cries, feeling both impressed and extremely jealous. "Teach me, teach me!"

Phoenix just chuckles a bit awkwardly, feeling slightly out of place with four destroyers looking up at her with wonder, one of which is visibly emitting sparkles from her face. "We, uh, we sortied to England once to meet the Royal Girls, Britain's ship girls, in other words, and for the sake 'a politeness, we all got taught how to do that and some other stuff..." Phoenix trails off as she turns around to look behind her.

"Phoenix-san?" Inazuma, growing worried at Phoenix's odd behavior, asks timidly. "I-Is something wrong...?"

"She's here, I think..." Phoenix mutters as her guns clink and clank with soft metallic crunches to ready a volley just in case. "...but somethin' feels off...girls, prime yer guns, might be an ambush here..."

"Hawawawa..."

Amidst Inazuma's whimpers of fright, the Sixth Destroyer Division nervously readies their weaponry, and Hibiki sets her hands on white fire as well, putting a hand on her anchor in case of a close-quarters melee fight. Phoenix peers into the distance.

"Oh, never mind, false alarm, false alarm," Phoenix grins, sighing with relief. "It's just Johnston; she's here, finally. Hey, Johnston, hurry it up, we've been waitin' all day for ya!"

A small, dark silhouette is gradually getting larger and larger as it approaches the rendezvous point. But after a few minutes, when the silhouette gets large enough, Phoenix and the destroyers can clearly see that the shadow in the distance is too big for just one ship girl. Johnston, for sure, is not alone.

_"My bad...I've made you four wait a long time, didn't I? I'll make it up to you some day. Ran into a few things on my way here..." _Phoenix's low voice plays in their ears via long-range transmission.

U.S.S. Johnston soon regroups with Phoenix and the Sixth Destroyer Division, who stare in mute confusion at their new guest ship girl. Five feet seven inches, or roughly 170 cm, Johnston has tanned skin, like that of a Native American, short light brown hair, and navy blue eyes. She wears an American-style sailor uniform, white shirt with a black tied collar, a short blue pleated skirt, biker spats, and black knee-high socks under her military combat boots. Her equipment gearbox, hooked onto her steel utility belt, sports two 5-inch (12.7cm) double-barrel turrets, one on each side, and two depth charge barrels jutting out to the sides as well. Her 21-inch (53cm) quintuple torpedo launchers are strapped to her upper legs, and a white dixie cup hat, adorned with a World-War II style service ribbon, sits on her hair, an eagle quill stuck over her left ear.

In her right hand is a very modernized and very bloody war hatchet. With its handle made of the same material used to manufacture military bayonet handles, the war hatchet has a serrated head made of carbon steel honed so sharply that even a whiff would split skin, engraved with Cherokee letters. All around her metal utility belt, smaller throwing tomahawks are strapped in, made of the same carbon steel and similarly produced, with only an empty space in the middle of the front of her utility belt, reserved for her war hatchet. And because Johnston wears no gloves, her hands are filled with abrasions and look leathery from using her melee weapons so frequently.

In her left hand, Johnston is dragging the limp body of a Battleship Symbiotic Hime, who is barely breathing.

"Well, damn, you get ambushed?" Phoenix asks in English, looking up and down Johnston's figure, and everywhere she sees, there's blood.

"By this one, a pack of destroyers, and a few light cruisers. They tracked my signal - they were probably out patrolling or something," Johnston replies with a hint of a Cherokee accent. "Bad timing on my part. But hey, what can you do..."

Johnston glances at the frightened destroyers, who are crowding around Phoenix because of the vicious image she's putting out.

"Ah...my bad, you girls. Things went a little bit...off," Johnston explains in fluent Japanese, the language having been pre-programmed in her main processing unit's data caches before her voyage across the Pacific Ocean. She looks back at Phoenix. "Show the way?"

"Sure...but I'm not sure how you're gonna explain yourself to the Admiral there. And for sure the other Japanese girls're gonna look at'cha real funny when we get there," Phoenix warns.

"I'm guessing they looked at you funny when you came here a few days ago?"

"Yeah, totally."

"I figured, you're a bit of a hothead."

"You're the last person I wanna hear that from, asshole! And you're still wearing that lame quill?"

"Sure, why not? It's not against regulation."

"Oh, bullshit! And why'd you bring that bitch with you all the way here? Jus' dump her already!"

"I figured the Japanese Navy would want a live prisoner from the Abyssal forces. I hear giving gifts is very important in Japanese culture."

_"Who the hell gives a gift like that!?"_


	12. The Dank Naval Base 1

**A/N:**

**Been a while since I've written one of these.**

**Chapter 12 was based on a request for one of the Taffy Three ships, an American task force credited with a heroic, 300-esque fight against a much more formidable IJN fleet. The only one that made sense to me to be turned into a ship girl was the USS Johnston, and because her commander was part Native American, I gave Johnston a Native American motif, tomahawk and all.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

Hi, Zuikaku here. Today's another ordinary day at the Rabaul Naval Base. The wind's coming through the base from the sea, the sun's out, Shoukaku-nee's getting me Ramune and some ice cream because...well, it's the summer, so what other excuse do we need...really, it's great here.

And when I say ordinary, what I really mean is -

_**BYUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! ! ! ! ! ! !**_

I literally slam my head against the ceiling of the hallway because I've jumped so high out of fright. An airhorn just got blasted right behind my head. I fall back down from the ceiling, spin around, and find my Admiral, a good-for-nothing seventeen-year-old who does nothing but screw around with his ship girls like me and sit in his office all day long playing video games and surfing the Internet, holding a goddamned airhorn canister.

"Y-You - _what the hell was that all about!?" _I start screaming at the top of my lungs. "More to the point, _why the hell are you carryin' around a fucking airhorn!?"_

But all the Admiral does is pull out a pair of sunglasses, put them on, cross his arms, and say,

"Ahem, that was for my 420 Blaze-it MLG 360 quickscope ladder-stall Y-Y claymore-drop montage, it'll be going up on my Youtube channel in about two hours." He makes the gun gesture out of his hands and wiggles his thumbs around like he's shooting them. "Bang bang. Deal with it."

This's gotta be one of his Internet-fueled non-sequiturs, right? Right? **_Right?_**

So I pull out my flight deck that I'm carrying around on my back in case of emergency sorties and smash it over his head so hard that I break my own flight deck in half.

"Can we, like, impeach you or something? Can't we do something like that?" I growl while my ears are still ringing like hell.

"Uh...huh? But...I'm your Admiral..." the Admiral says, dazed by my flight deck attack, but he shakes himself awake again. "Oh, more importantly, I'm gonna be doing large ship construction today. Do you have any recommended recipes that I should try?"

"Huh!? LSC? But I've heard that's just a waste of precious resources, nobody ever gets what they want from that crap anyway!" I object, tossing away the broken half of my flight deck. The fairies can pick up the bits later.

"But I'm too fucking lazy to send you all on missions, I don't wanna do the events 'cause I need to download all the H-doujins of you and Shoukaku from Comiket from my torrents, and it's summer, so I'm too lazy to do anything, really."

_"WHY ARE YOU GETTING ECCHI STUFF ABOUT ME AND MY SISTER FROM COMIKET, YOU PISS-SHIT ADMIRAL!?"_

"Um..." the Admiral tilts his head up to the ceiling, then flashes a thumbs up at me. "#JustTeitokuThings, what else?"

One moment later, the Admiral finds my foot in between his legs, and I watch him grovel in front of me with his hands in his crotch.

"Oh God...well, that wasn't exactly how I was imaginin' bustin' a nut over you today...talk about #badfootjobs..."

_"Can I use you for modernization fodder? Please? Pretty please?" _I threaten with a raised fist that's convulsing with a huge anger vein.

"No, you can't use normal humans for upgrading, Zuikaku-san..."

_"THEN I'LL FIND A WAY FOR YOU THEN, SHAN'T I?"_

"Zuikaku-san, you've - y-you've got this really scary look in your eye and I don't like it...if you wouldn't look at me like that, that'd be greaaaaaAaaaaaAAaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhHHHHHHH! ! ! ! ! !"

* * *

Three minutes later, I'm standing in front of the Admiral's desk, with the Admiral slumped over his desk sitting in his chair. I've beaten the living crap out of him so badly that his entire uniform is smoking from the amount of heat generated from the contact of my fists with his body.

"Look, we don't have a lot of resources, end of the line. Despite you claiming that you've been lazy these days, you've been sortieing me, Shoukaku, and Hiryuu-san a lot these days, so we've been plowing through our resource pool by ourselves a lot. We don't have a lot of destroyers to dedicate to pure resource runs either, so shouldn't your priority be to just complete a few low-end nodes so that you can get the basic destroyers? Honestly, you don't even know the basics of a stupid web browser game, how can you even have the balls to call yourself an Admiral?"

The Admiral looks up at me with teary eyes. "Yeah...you don't have to remind me...Shigure tells me that all the time whenever she's my secretary ship for the day...how my job _is _being a shitty Admiral..." The Admiral goes back to turtling his arms underneath his head, but I just roll my eyes again, feeling no sympathy whatsoever for him.

"Is this one of those #FirstWorldProblems that you always go on about?" I mumble unamusedly. "Geez, learn to man up, will you. It's not like _you _have to risk your life every day out at the front lines."

"Well, it's not like you need to either," the Admiral lifts his head up quickly, "I always give you and Shoukaku Instant Repair Goddesses, after all."

"I-Ignoring that, you asshole! So anyway, what're you gonna do about LSC? Are you gonna go ahead with it or not?"

The Admiral shrugs. "Sure, why not? Haven't done it in a long time, after all. I mean, if I got Shoukaku from it, then I can probably score huge on another one, too..."

This sends my brain out to orbit when I hear what he's just said. "W-WHAAAAA? You - You fucking scumbag, you got Shoukaku-nee from LSC!?" I shrilly scream at my Admiral. "So that's how she got here before me!"

"Wait, why is that so surprising to you, I thought she already told you, you two bein' ship sisters 'n all..."

_"She didn't mention something like that! Ever!"_

"Ah, well..." the Admiral picks up the sheet of paper that he'll use to submit to the fairies over at the LSC port at base. "For the time being, let's...put in all max..."

I quickly walk over to his table, put my hands underneath the desk, and flip his table so hard it crashes through the back wall of his office.

_**"I didn't actually hear what I just thought I heard, right...?" **_I approach the Admiral with steps that'll echo in his brain for the rest of his life.

"C-Calm down, Zuikaku-sama, there's - there's no reason to get angry, I can explain - !" the Admiral tries to worm his way out of this, but I won't let him.

_**"Explain? EXPLAIN? YOU'RE GOING TO TRY TO EVEN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN TO ME WHY YOU JUST SUGGESTED PUTTING IN MAXIMUM RESOURCES FOR SOMETHING AS DUMB AS LSC? ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ALL OF US SUFFER? SHOULD I SEND YOU TO HELL FIRST BEFORE THAT HAPPENS?"**_

"Zuikaku-sama, your back! You're growing wings! _You're growing really evil-looking wings right now, I don't know if you noticed, but they look really dangerous! We can't be breaking copyrights right now, you can't do that here! ! !"_

"Zuikaku, I brought our ice cream~" my older ship sister, Shoukaku-nee, walks into the office with a tray of ice cream and Ramune bottles, and I instantly calm down at the mind-soothing sight of my beloved ship sister.

"Shoukaku-nee~" I prance over to her to get my ice cream. "It didn't take you too long, did it? I know everyone at base's trying to get their hands on these things, now that it's summer..."

"It wasn't too bad. In fact, I was the first one there," Shoukaku-nee discloses quite proudly.

"Huh, really? At this time, the destroyers would be all over that stuff in the kitchen..."

"By the way, Admiral, I heard you were planning to do some LSC today?" Shoukaku glances over at the Admiral, who's resumed his seat behind his now-nonexistent desk. "Um...Admiral, why is there a big hole in the wall behind you? And why is your desk missing?"

"Well, you see, Shoukaku-kun..." the Admiral again pulls on his sunglasses and assumes the Gendou pose on his knees, "I, um...had to exude some of my overflowing manliness and libido for a second, so I had to throw my desk out of my office in a vulgar display of strength and rage. Please, this is not because a certain carrier around here got pissed off at me for wanting to go all max into LSC planning. It really isn't."

Shoukaku, much like me, just stares incredulously at the Admiral.

"Uh...yes, sir, whatever you say..." Shoukaku-nee nods dryly and slowly. "Hopefully...erm, hopefully you can manage our resources well, we are running rather low the last time I checked, so we ought to go on some resource gathering runs very soon..."

"That's the plan. In the meantime, I'll continue with LSC. I mean, I've been pretty lucky with it so far, may as well give it another spin in the tank. #YOLO."

The Admiral writes in his numbers on the LSC sheet.

"It's time to aim for Yamato...hehehehee, I heard from the other Admirals that she's the fuckin' beaut..." the Admiral chuckles to himself quite heinously. "Airhorn for good luck!" He pulls out that airhorn canister from nowhere and blasts it again, making me and Shoukaku-nee jump.

"Is that a cue for me to go grab another flight deck and break it over your head again?" I threaten murderously. "If so, I don't mind getting used to that kind of cue."

"No, Zuikaku-san, you're misunderstanding the proper use of a flight deck...believe it or not, it's actually _not _used to be broken over your Admiral's head..."

_"Oh ho? And who's the carrier here who'll actually use it, hm?"_

"...you, Zuikaku-san."

"That's what I thought."

Shoukaku just giggles. "You two have gotten so much more lively around each other, now that he's married you, Zuikaku."

I click my tongue. "But it's not like anything's gotten any different!" I raise my left hand, looking at the ring on my ring finger. "He's just still a brat Admiral who does nothing but thrive on his stupid little dank memes all day long and drive the rest of us mad doing stupid shit all the time. He's not the kind of person I _wanted _to marry!"

At this, the Admiral gets up from his chair and walks over to us, with that usual stupid cheeky scrublord grin of his, as he likes to call it himself.

"Oh? Tsundere Zuikaku much, huh? But our honeymoon night was great, wasn't it?" he grins like a madman as he leans in towards me, and I can't help but to feel my face redden and punch him in the face against on reflex. But this time he's wised up to it, so he backs off before he gets hit and suddenly breaks out that silly, stupid dance that's apparently based on me and is all over the Internet or something.

"Zui, zui!" he laughs as he pumps his arms in that retarded dance. "C'mon, Zuikaku, this's supposed to be for you, ain't it? Zui zui zui zui!"

"N-No! Dumbass, I'm not gonna do somethin' that embarrassing, you fucking kidding me!?" I holler. I turn to Shoukaku-nee, wanting her to back me up to get the Admiral to stop. "Shoukaku-nee, you think it's - "

My jaw drops to the floor. Shoukaku-nee, laughing contagiously, hops over to the Admiral and also imitates his dance.

"Oh, c'mon, Zuikaku, this looks fun! You should try it," Shoukaku-nee giggles. "Zui, zui! See, it's fun!"

"Yeah, your sister knows how it's done! You're always on about Shoukaku-nee this and Shoukaku-nee that, right? C'mon, don't'cha wanna join Shoukaku-nee this time too?" the Admiral's face has turned into the Troll face meme, and the sarcasm burns hot on my face. Seeing this, the Admiral then pulls out a saltshaker from his back pocket, which makes me wonder why he even bothers keeping a saltshaker in his back pocket int he first place. "Ooohhh, Zuikaku's gettin' a bit salty, eh? I like my tsundere's nice 'n salty!"

_**"ADMIRAL, YOU ASSHOOOOOOOLLLLLLEEEEEE! ! ! ! !"**_


	13. Curry Night

**A/N:**

**The last chapter was pretty non sequitur. Dank memes all over the place. Either you got them or you didn't.  
**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

It's Friday. The fleet knows what this means - it's curry day.

"Of course Friday's gotta be a curry day! Everyone knows that!" Shiratsuyu squeals with excitement, being a huge fan of curry herself.

"Well, I'm just thankful the Admiral put _us _in charge of curry duty this week," Suzukaze adds, rolling her eyes. "Imagine if Hiei-san and her sisters were on curry duty. I'd have Samidare go ram her or somethin' just ta get her outta here."

"Waaaahh...Suzukaze, don't say things like that..." Samidare whines, a bit embarrassed.

The Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers are assembled in the kitchen on curry duty this week. Shigure and Murasame, being the best cooks among their class, are managing too great cooking pots filled almost to the brim with warmly bubbling curry. Samidare and Shiratsuyu are cutting the vegetables and preparing other curry ingredients, while Harusame is helping Murasame with her curry pot. All the while, amidst a kitchen full of the warm and delicious wafts of curry scent, Suzukaze and Yuudachi are making -

"Doughnuts...?" Shigure asks in a bit of an incredulous tone. "What...why doughnuts...? Is that supposed to be our dessert tonight after curry?"

"Yep!" Yuudachi cries happily. She and Suzukaze, the base's greatest proponents of doughnuts, are molding doughnuts with their latex-glove-equipped hands and setting them on the baking tray to have them bake while the curry is finishing so that everyone can have doughnuts after dinner tonight is consumed.

"What, Shigure, we haven't had doughnuts in forever, so what's the harm in makin' some?" Suzukaze scowls a bit at her older ship sister. "You'd like some too, right? I'm makin' your favorite vanilla-top chocolate cream doughnut, so I'll make ya a lot, okay?"

Shigure blushes in embarrassment at the mention of her favorite doughnut of all time, so she quickly turns away without saying another word of disapproval.

"Hehe, Shigure's so cute whenever we give her doughnuts. She loooooooooooooooooves them, poi!" Yuudachi giggles, her hair flaps of her second remodel dancing up and down.

"Urgh...b-be quiet, Yuudachi," Shigure blushes even more and turns away. "You're bullying me. I don't want doughnuts if you're going to tease me about them."

"Eeeehhh...o-okay, I'll - I'll, uh, I won't tease you anymore, so eat our doughnuts with everyone, okay?" Yuudachi, putting another doughnut down on the baking tray, flails her arms towards Shigure.

Murasame, meanwhile, fishes out a small tasting cup's worth of curry and laps up a bit of curry to test the food's potency.

"Hmm..." Murasame murmurs, frowning indecisively and unable to come to a firm conclusion. "Harusame, can you try some of this? I don't know whether I need to add in some more salt..."

Harusame, sidestepping over next to her ship sister, sips up the rest of the curry in the tasting up as Murasame feeds it to her.

"Um...I think it does need a bit more salt. Not a lot, but...but just a little," Harusame determines.

"You think so too, right? Then let's add a bit more..." Murasame takes the saltshaker and taps just a fingertip's worth of salt into the pot and stirs, and Harusame takes a palmful of sliced carrots and onions and pork to place into the pot. "Oh, you're such a big help, Harusame...what would I ever do without you..."

"Uuu...you're making me blush, Onee-san..." Harusame, indeed feeling her face flush, giggles awkwardly. "I...I'm just doing what I can to help, since...since I can't cook that well..."

"Oh, there you go being all cute again," Murasame sets down the curry ladle and rubs her hands against Harusame's cheeks as Harusame giggles some more at the sensation. "Before you dropped, Murasame-onee-san had to manage this pot all by herself, you know? Shigure would always have Yuudachi helping her whenever Yuudachi wasn't making doughnuts, even though Shigure's the better cook than me. And plus, you have such a good sense of taste, too. You always know when something's too spicy or too salty or too sweet, and everyone loves our cooking. They always ask us what kind of secret ingredients we put into our food, but little do they know that it's actually the love from our cute little Harusame~!"

Murasame suddenly glomps Harusame, rubbing her cheek this time against Harusame's cheek, and Harusame blushes very hard, thoroughly enjoying this display of affection from a fellow ship sister.

Samidare, placing another handful of vegetables into Shigure's cooking pot of curry, wipes her hands on her apron when she sees the Failure Penguin that popped out of equipment development the other day toddling over to the carton of dozen eggs above the cutting board. It picks up an egg in its flippers and carefully lifts it up to its head and places it there, balancing it carefully and not letting it fall. Thinking that this is pretty funny and cute, Samidare feels the impulse to attempt the same stunt and picks up an egg from the carton too and starts balancing it on her own head, but she finds it rather tough, so she starts concentrating on it, trying her hardest to get the egg properly balanced on her head.

"Samidare? What're you doin', help me cut these potatoes - " Shiratsuyu, seeing Samidare's back first and not seeing the egg on the latter's head, puts her hand on Samidare's shoulder, causing Samidare to get spooked quite badly and jerking her head forward. This causes her hand, which is in the way, to palm-smash the egg into her head, breaking it and spilling egg yolk and albumen all over her head.

"Eeeek - !" Samidare squeals in fright, shivering at the cold, slimy feeling of egg now dripping down her hair and forehead and face. "Ooohh...I broke it..."

At Samidare's squeal, everyone in the kitchen sharply turns to her to see what's happened.

"S-Samidare?! What the, did somethin' happen? What's wrong?" Suzukaze asks urgently, putting down the doughnut she's been molding to check and make sure her ship sister is okay.

"U-Uh...y-yeah, I'm...I'm okay, I just...I just kind of broke an egg over my head, ehehe..." Samidare, blushing a bit at her own clumsy mistake, puts the tip of her tongue out in self-effacing humor.

"You smashed an egg over your head? How the heck did you manage _that_...?" Shiratsuyu asks with a bit of a snort of disbelief that she can't help but to let out as she tears off rolls of paper towels from the paper towel roll nearby and carefully scoops up the yolk sitting on Samidare's head while Suzukaze uses her hand towel to remove the goopy albumen.

"Well..I tried to imitate Penguin-chan over here..." Samidare points out the Failure Penguin, who is still somehow managing to keep the egg balanced on its head. "I tried doing the same thing, but...but I didn't do it so well..."

"Oh...geez, don't scare us like that, Samidare," Suzukaze sighs a breath of relief as she goes back to working on making doughnuts again. "Thought you cut yourself or somethin' dangerous..."

"Awww...sorry..."

"I'll make you feel better, Samidare, poi~!" Yuudachi announces, lifting up her doughnut. "Your favorite, blueberry jam!"

At this, Samidare's ears perk up, and her face, despite the icky remains of the broken egg over her head, begins to sparkle.

"B-Blueberry jam doughnuts!? Ohhh, thank you, Yuudachi-onee-san!"

"I'll make you one more each time you call me 'onee-san', poi!" Yuudachi promises as she dances over to Samidare's side, holding a freshly molded blueberry jam doughnut. Because Shigure always treats Yuudachi as a bit of a younger sister, Yuudachi loves it when her younger ship sisters like Samidare and Harusame address her as an older sister to them.

"Yuudachi-onee-san, Yuudachi-onee-san, Yuudachi-onee-san, Yuudachi-onee-san~!" Samidare sings happily, blushing at the thought of all the blueberry jam doughnuts she can eat.

"Awwwwright, I'm gonna make five doughnuts just for Samidare-chan~! They're gonna be so round and squiggly and tender and deeeeeelish, poi~" Yuudachi also sing alongside Samidare, and together, the two of them break out into impromptu song:

_"Doughnut, doughnut, oh how sweet and round you are, yummy and funny and making everyone smile~"_

"Well, aren't you two quite the idols," Shiratsuyu laughs, beginning to cut the potatoes on her own instead of waiting for Samidare to join her. "Don't let Naka-chan hear you, otherwise she's going to suspect that you're about to steal her top idol spot from the fleet."

"It's okay, we don't need to be idols, poi," Yuudachi looks over at her eldest ship sister past Samidare's shoulders. "Our singing's reserved exclusively for our own class. It's nice if we have a few special things all to ourselves, right, poi?"

"That's right, that's right," Murasame agrees, nodding her head seriously. "For example, only I get to make Harusame's cheeks go rub-a-dub-dub like this~" With that, Murasame, stirring the ladle in the curry pot with her left hand, pinches Harusame's cheek lightly and flubbers it around.

"Waaaahhh...Murasame-onee-saaaaaan..." Harusame giggles more loudly at Murasame's antics.

"Hey, no fair! Then if that's going to be the case, then I'm the only other person who gets to wear Harusame-chan's hat!" Yuudachi declares, and hopping over behind Harusame, Yuudachi snatches her younger ship sister's beret off her head and sticks it on top of her own. "With this and my scarf, I'm so ready for winter! Yeeeeehawwwww, poi~!"

The remodeled destroyer runs a fun lap around the kitchen while sporting Harusame's beret. Harusame, feeling a bit insecure without her hat, cries out in alarm and follows after Yuudachi, flailing her arms about weakly, crying, "Heeeyyyy, Yuudachi-onee-saaaaaan, give it baaaaack, give me my hat baaaaaaaaack~"

The door to the kitchen opens, and the Admiral, a tall young cadet fresh from naval school who's been in charge of this naval base for about five months now, enters to check on the status of dinner.

"How's the curry coming along, girls?" he asks, and hearing his voice, the Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers wave at him in welcome.

"We're almost done, Admiral," Shigure smiles at him. The Admiral nods, grinning back, before he spots the materials that the destroyers have taken out of the pantry to make doughnuts. "Doughnuts again tonight, huh? I don't mind, we kind of needed an excuse to use up the eggs and sugar, I think they're close to expiring if I'm not mistaken..."

"Oh, they're 'bout to expire? We may as well just use up the rest 'a 'em 'n make 'em into more doughnuts if that's the case," Suzukaze suggests.

"If you want, that's fine by me," the Admiral shrugs.

"Admiral, come here, come here," Shigure beckons him over to her, and he obeys. Shigure offers him a tasting cup of curry. "Here, please tell me what you think of this."

The Admiral sips up the curry and hands the cup back to Shigure. "It's nice as always. I can tell this one's different from the last one you made - you must've spread out the salt a bit more and decreased the amount. I think it's perfect now," he nods with approval, putting a satisfied smile on Shigure's face.

"Oh...but Admiral, I know a kind of curry that's even more perfect than this," Shigure suddenly mentions, smiling coyly.

"Oh yeah? Let's see it."

Shigure stands up on her tippy toes and steals a smooth kiss from the Admiral's curry-laden lips, right in front of the watchful eyes of all the rest of her ship sisters.

"Thank you for the meal," Shigure giggles quite seductively. "That was...quite delicious."

_**"Heeeeeey, Shigureeeeeeee! ! ! Th-Th-That was supposed to be m-m-m-MY first k-kiss with the Admiral! ! !" **_Shiratsuyu screams, wagging an accusing finger at Shigure.


	14. The Shiratsuyu-Class Special 1

**A/N:**

**Been a long time since I've updated this. May as well get around to it now before I forget it.**

**The funny thing about this last chapter was that I uploaded it the night before - perhaps even the same night as - the update that implemented Kawakaze and Umikaze into the game. Obviously the last chapter would have been a bit different if I had held off another day. In addition, the last chapter was inspired by a pic I saw on Danbooru during the time I wrote it that actually does depict the Shiratsuyu-Class making dinner - some of you may know which one I'm talking about.  
**

**So in order to make up for that, enjoy this chapter instead.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Ahem, ahem, test, test. Is this thing on?"

"It should be, Kirishima-san said that she spent all morning trying to get the mics set up...they should be live."

"Hey, hey, Yuudachi, don't do that, this isn't a toy..."

"I bet she'd play fetch with it though."

"Shiratsuyu-nee-chan, don't make fun of me, poi!"

"I'm just sayin', you so totally would play fetch with it, though."

"S-So what if I would, poi!?"

"Here, fetch!"

_"Poi!"_

"A-Ah, what're you - Shiratsuyu-nee-san, please don't throw that, these are all valuable equipment here...!"

"I know, right? Not ta mention Kirishima-aneki's gonna kick some ass if she ever finds out we threw one 'a 'er precious mics..."

_"Heeeyyy! Who just threw a microphone!? I heard that! ! !"_

"See? Told'ja."

"Hey, hey...so, like, on a scale of one to ten, how scary do ya think Kirishima-san gets when someone tampers wit'da mic?"

"Uhhh..."

"No, wait, that's fuckin' bullshit, Suzu."

"Huh? Da hell do ya mean by that, 'it's bullshit'?"

"Because! We don't got anythin' to compare it to. Numbers are vague as shit."

"Fine, then...um...is she scarier than Kaga-san gets when somebody other 'n Akagi-san steals her afternoon gyoza?"

"No, no no no no..."

"Yeah, I wouldn't say so either...that's kind of hard to top."

"But Kirishima-san is still a battleship...she can get really scary..."

"That's true too..."

"More than that, what's taking so long...?"

"Waaaahh...Kirishima-san's scarryyy, Shigure, save meeeee, pooii~!"

"Well, if you didn't always chase after things like this, she wouldn't scold you, Yuudachi..."

_"Okay, Shiratsuyu-Class, you're going live in thirty seconds! Drink some water, settle down, and get ready! I'll give you another reminder at ten!"_

"So, um, why are we doing this again...? Kawakaze and I just got posted to this base, so..."

"So the Admiral said we needed to make something called a 'drama CD'...so that's basically what we're about to do."

"And...what...exactly are we supposed to do...?"

"We're going to talk about our lives here at Yokosuka Naval Yards, and then we'll upload the CD to the internet! It'll be fun!"

"Honestly, that sounds like a surefire way to make ourselves look like total idiots to everybody on the net."

"Aww, Suzukaze, please don't be like that, this is going to be a good way to improve our image to everyone in the country!"

"As if we didn't already know that."

"O-Okay, but, but - the Admiral wants us to do it, so we have to do what he asks, right?"

"Sami, you're tryin' too hard to get on his good side - "

_"Ten seconds, girls! I'll count down from five!"_

"Okay, everyone knows our opening lines, we've all practiced it for like five hours last night. If anybody screws up - "

_"Five!"_

"I'm gonna - "

_"Four!"_

" - make you - "

_"Three!"_

" - clean out - "

_"Two!"_

" - our rooms!"

_"One!"_

"Good afternoon, everyoooooonnneeee~!"

"This's gonna be our first rendition of the ship girls' podcast comin' at'cha live, straight from Yokosuka, the Shiratsuyu-Special!"

"Hey, why's it gotta be the 'Shiratsuyu-Special'?"

"Because I said so, damn it! Anyway, I'm the first Shiratsuyu-Class destroyer, and your host, Shiratsuyu!"

"My name is Shigure."

"Murasame here~"

"Yuudachi's here, poi!"

"Ha - Harusame, r-reporting for duty - !"

"S-Samidare, at your service!"

"I'm Umikaze."

"Kawakaze's in the buildin', y'all."

"'Sup, it's Suzukaze!"

"And we're - "

_"The Ichijou Destroyer Squadron!"_

"Wait, Samidare-chan, Suzukaze-chan, why didn't you two say anything there?"

"Tch. What do you friggin' think?"

"We...weren't designed by Ichijou-sensei..."

"Oh."

_"...girls, you're still live."_

"A-Ah, yeah, right, right, right! So uh - yeah, welcome to the first ever Shiratsuyu Special live podcast! Like I said, I'm - "

_"Like I said, why the fuck does it gotta be the 'Shiratsuyu' Special!?"_

"Holy crap, like, do you have a problem with that or something, Kawakaze?! Respect your older sister, why don't'cha!"

"If you were actually as strong as any 'a the rest 'a us, then maybe you'd have some goddamn leverage! But'cha don't! All you give a shit 'bout is bein' first! First this, first that! First, first, first! And who was it who ranked dead fuckin' _last _in our combat proficiency trials the other day?"

"Wow, low blow there, Kawakaze."

"You guys, please, we have people listening to us live right now...sigh..."

"Thank God Sazanami-chan isn't here right now, poi..."

"I know, right."

"U-Uh, um, we - we're all very happy to be bringing you this s-special program! Um - um - uh - "

"I think it is appropriate for us to introduce this program. The Shiratsuyu-Special Podcast is a live radio show broadcast on the Internet to our fans and listeners in Japan and around the world. We will mainly be discussing everyday life here at our home base, the Yokosuka Naval Yards, and our thoughts living here."

"Good going, Shigure."

"I'm disappointed in your ability to host, Shiratsuyu-onee-san."

"Urk..."

"So, then, let us have our beautiful and wonderful host start us off, shall we? Shiratsuyu-nee-chan, what do you think about life here at Yokosuka?"

"Eh, I'm on the spot now? After I just got freakin' roasted by my own little sister?"

"Ya salty, Aneki? Here, I got somethin' for ya."

"Wait a minute, where'd you even get this?"

"Took it from the mess hall. Figured I might need it for this exact purpose."

"You're a sonuva - "

_"Girls, pay attention!"_

"Right, right. Um - well, life here's pretty good. We get up, eat, train, fight, go on quests, expeditions..."

"Eat, sleep, fight, repeat! Eat, sleep, fight, repeat! Eat, sleep, fight, repair bucket, poi!"

"Yuudachi!"

"Hehe, sorry, poi!"

"But like, Shiratsuyu-nee-chan, be more specific, our listeners probably want to know more. What exactly makes living here so enjoyable?"

"Well, if they _really _gotta know, it isn't like we had anywhere _else _to live - "

"Let's spare them the more sensitive details for now. Although I admit that is probably common knowledge by now."

"The fact that I'm always the first one at the mess hall is pretty neat!"

"There she goes again, 'bout bein' fuckin' first - "

"Kawakaze, for the love of God, please do not interrupt our eldest sister every four point eight seconds, otherwise I will have to _punish _you thoroughly tonight."

"...wow, Kawakaze, yer kinduva pushover when it comes ta Umikaze, huh?"

"...shut the fuck up, Suzu. Ain't like yer so different with Samidare-aneki."

"At least I don't bend over for her like you do."

_"Girls, can you stop interrupting each other? How many times do we have to tell you this is live? You're making yourselves look like idiots!"_

"Whoa, Kirishima-san's gettin' mad. But no, seriously, being first in the mess hall every morning is pretty sweet. You know why? 'Cause I get to have first dibs on Mamiya-san's morning gyoza. You can tell which ones got really well cooked, the ones towards the middle 'a the frying pan, and the ones that aren't so cooked. Love it."

"Pssh...that's why she's got the lowest scores on our combat proficiency trials, poi. Too busy stuffin' herself with gyoza."

"Hey, at least I've been improving over the last few weeks! The Admiral's been leveling me up consistently lately!"

"That's...that's, uh, because the Admiral tried sortieing us all together that one time, and then you...got criticalled nearly instantly because he didn't realize your level was so low...Shiratsuyu-onee-san."

"And that's so friggin' B.S.! Even though I'm the first one he should've been leveling up!"

"Okay, okay, I think that's enough gameplay commentary out of our eldest Shiratsuyu-Class here. What about you, Shigure-nee-chan?"

"Me? Oh...well, I must say I'd have to agree with Shiratsuyu-onee-san. Life here is great. The Admiral is kind, we have wonderful and powerful comrades who make sure our missions and quests always turn out successfully, and I have eight other ship sisters with me whom I all love."

"Awwww..."

"My feels! My _feeeeeels! _Shigureeeeeeee, I love you tooooo, poooooooi!"

"W-Waaah?! Y-You guys, this - this isn't something you ought to be getting all - oh, I don't even..."

"I'd jus' like to point out that we're still missin' Yamakaze, though."

"Oh...yeah, right..."

"Please, implement Yamakaze soon!"

"Kadokawa, you can hear us, can't'cha? We just need one more for the full set, you can do that, can't'cha?"

"The rain dance! We'll do the Shiratsuyu-Class-exclusive rain dance! That way, we'll definitely convince Kadokawa to put in Yamakaze for us, poi! Harusame, go fill that drum 'a yours with rainwater the next time it starts raining!"

"O-Okay, roger that!"

"A-Anyway! I think that - I think that the best part about this base, however, is the Admiral. He - he is always so kind to us. He always tries his hardest to make sure we can always win our battles no matter what."

"I have noticed that myself as well. Two days ago, the Admiral wouldn't even send Kawakaze and I on our first sortie together without a full heavy cruiser escort squadron. It seems he really wanted to keep us safe."

"Well, considerin' how fuckin' hard that last event was to get ya two, I'd feel the same way, y'know?"

"That ain't hardly our fault, bitch..."

"Remember that time when we were under Level 10? The Admiral wouldn't even let us go on that one mission to the Kis Island seas until we were all at least level 20, back when it was just the four of us, Shiratsuyu-nee-chan, Shigure-nee-chan, me, and Yuudachi-chan."

"Yeah, that, and he didn't send us 'til we were all upgraded."

"And then he leveled us to 30."

"And then he waited until R&amp;D got us all equipped with 10-cm's and quad torpedoes."

"And then he had us train in easy nodes to gain battle morale."

"And then we beat the entire thing in one try."

"Say, don't any of you think that maybe, he's just, like, really obsessed with us, poi? Because, like, we're the highest leveled destroyer class in the entire base. Like, no lie, poi."

"Well, he's always said he's liked us all as a destroyer class, so..."

"That...that's t-true...the Admiral said to me once that he really liked me and all of us together collectively..."

"He's just a big fan of your pink hair, Harusame-onee-san."

"It's because he's _my _fan. Let's be real here. Plus, I was his first Shiratsuyu-Class destroyer, none of _you _can top that."

"Hah, says the one who's only got a base 49 max firepower stat at level 20, poi!"

_"It's not my fault Kadokawa hasn't given me a second Kai yet, Yuudachi! Shut up!"_

_"Alright, girls, that's enough for one segment! Throw it into intermission!"  
_

"Ah, we just got word from our producer that we're going to have to put the show on intermission! Thank you all for listening thus far, and we'll be right back~!"

"See ya soon, poi!"

"Man, seriously, this is actually kind of tough, doing a radio talk show over the internet."

"But it's fun, isn't it?"

"Samidare-chan, you haven't even done much talking at all, though."

"I-I'll try my b-best!"

"But like, are me 'n Umikaze _supposed _to be here? It ain't like we can really talk much, we haven't even been posted here more 'n a few days ago."

"Everyone will have their chance to talk, Kawakaze. Don't you worry~"

"...you sound awfully enthusiastic 'bout that, Murasame-aneki..."


	15. The Shiratsuyu-Class Special 2

**A/N:**

**For those of you who have been reading my stories for some time, you can very easily tell that the Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers are among my favorite ship girls in Kantai. Two of my stories feature two of them as main characters, and out of my top ten all-time favorite ship girls in Kantai, the Shiratsuyu-Class alone make up half of them.**

**I've also recently been having growing interest in the concept of "drama CD's", although I can't say that I know what they are since I've never actually listened to one. The last chapter was my attempt at one, but by that point I guess it's something else entirely.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Okay, is everyone good to go again? We're about to start, going live again in ten!"

"Hey, Umikaze-aneki, do you know if there's any more mizu youkan from yesterday in the fridge?"

"Um, there should still be a few more..."

"Sweet. That bitch Shimakaze took the last few ones earlier today at lunch. Said they were for her sisses. Prolly total bullshit..."

"Alright, girls, you're live!"

"Welcome back to the Shiratsuyu-Special, hope you guys didn't miss us too mu - "

"Still with the whole 'Shiratsuyu-Special' shit!"

"Oh, get over it already, don't be so salty that _you're _not the host of the show!"

_"Say what, ya stupid fuckin' level twenty-somethin' lil' - "_

"Kawakaze! Please, don't throw the microphone!"

"S-Sorry."

"_Anywaaaaay, _'fore we got interrupted there, let's pick up where we left off, shall we? Uh...so...pssst, does anyone know where we left off?"

"Everyone give a round 'a applause for our wonderful host Shiratsuyu-Aneki-sama. Such a wonderful host. I'm a big fan, Aneki-sama. Big fan, big fan."

"U-Um, we...we left off at...at talking about what we think about this base, didn't we...?"

"Ah, yeah, yeah, that's right, thanks Harusame! I think we had Shigure talk 'bout that for a bit, so why don't we move on ta Murasame?"

"Oh, me? Well then - ahem, hello everybody, Murasame here, third of the Shiratsuyu-Class~ Ummmm, let's see, what I enjoy most about the base here...honestly, I'd have to say how free our schedules are. Remember when we were first posted here? I thought the Admiral was going to be a really strict person when we met him for the first time. It was scary..."

"I thought so too! But he turned out to be such a nice guy, poi. What did you two think, Umikaze-chan, Kawakaze-chan?"

"Um, I didn't think he was scary...but I do agree that he does tend to have an intense face sometimes..."

"It's 'cause he's always so busy with sorties 'n stuff. He's always plannin' shit, y'know? Sorties, expeditions, trainin' regimens..."

"That's what's so great about him, in my opinion. He is a man of action, and he's always so productive. Plus, like we've said before, he cares about all of us so much. Especially us Shiratsuyu-Class. I wonder...why _does _he care about us so much? I mean, it's never been a doubt that he's _very _partial towards us. And please don't say it's because of Harusame-chan's pink hair."

"A-Aw..."

"Hey, hey, Murasame, don't get so riled up 'n jealous jus' 'cause you walked in on 'im combin' Harusame's hair one afternoon, mkay?"

"I-I-I was _not _j-jealous! ! !"

"See!? You're blushin', _blushin'! _Jealous, I'm tellin' ya!"

"Was not! Was not! Was not!"

"But it actually _is _true. The Admiral told me one day when I was working as secretary that one of the reasons why he liked us a lot as a ship class was because all of us had really beautiful hair. Did...did he tell anyone else that? Or was I the only one?"

"No..."

"Nope."

"Uh-uh..."

"Wow, Samidare. Keepin 'a lil' dirty secret with the Admiral, huh? Makin' progress on 'im 'fore the rest 'a us? That's dirty. I didn't know you could play dirty."

"Y-Yeah, Samidare-chan! Don't hog the Admiral all to yourself! I haven't got to be secretary even once yet, poi! And here you are having all sorts of these great conversations with him!"

"I-I-I-It's no-nothing of the sort! Please d-don't think that I'm up to no good!"

"Oooh, Samidare-chan's thinking of _naaaauuuughty _things now, isn't she? What were you thinking of there, hm? Care to share them with us?"

"M-Murasame-onee-saaaaaan! ! !"

"To be fair, Samidare _does _have the most beautiful hair out of all of us. It's understandable at the Admiral would tell her that."

"E-Eh!? M-M-Me!? No, that...that can't be right, surely...?"

"I can vouch for that. I mean, at first it was Samidare who was hands down Most Beautiful Hair girl, and then Harusame started contesting that when she came along, and then now Umikaze."

"Ooohh...I-I don't think...my hair is as good as Samidare's...her's is too beautiful, I can't win..."

"H-Harusame-onee-san!? No, wait, please - h-have some more confidence in yourself...!"

"I agree too. I think Samidare's hair is uncontested."

"Then let's have a quick vote to settle it! All in favor of Samidare's hair, raise your hands! That's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight, including me! Now, is there anyone who would like to raise an objection? Didn't think so! Congratulations to Samidare, for winning the seventh monthly 'Best In-Class Hair' Award!"

"F-Fueeeeh!? Aaaaahhh...oooohhh...p-p-please don't clap for me...about s-something like that..."

"Okay, okay, back to the topic. Murasame, was there anything else you wanted to add?"

"Well, I just quickly wanted to finish my point about having relatively open schedules."

"Ah, right, right."

"So like I was saying, I thought the Admiral was the type to give his ship girls really strict schedules. But as it turns out, he is very lenient with schedules. All that he asks for is for us to show up to deployment whenever he gives us notice that we are due for an expedition or sortie. Other than this, we are free to do whatever we wish with our free time."

"Alright, moving on to Yuudachi. What's your take on this? What's the best thing about this base, in your opinion?"

_**"THE DOUGHNUTS, POI!"**_

"W-Whoa...such enthusiasm. Well, we all kinda...already knew that though..."

"But it's true, poi! Mamiya-san's and Irako-san's doughnuts are the greatest, poi! I can't live without them, poi! In fact, I want some right now, poi! I'll be right back, poi!"

"Y-Yuudachi, no, wait - sit - _still! _You are _not _going anywhere, Yuudachi!"

"A-Auuuu..."

"We're in the middle of a broadcast and you're about to leave to get a doughnut? Please have some sense!"

"B-But the doughnuts, pooooiii..."

"Er, Yuudachi-onee-san, what else..._other _than the doughnuts...do you like about this base?"

"Hm...? Oh, well...Mamiya-san, or Irako-san, I guess?"

"Oh? And why is that?"

_"Because they make me doughnuts whenever I want them, poi!"_

"A-Ah...I-I see...so it was just all about the doughnuts in the end, wasn't it..."

"Ah! I just remembered, poi!"

"W-What, Yuudachi-onee-san? What did you, um, remember...?"

"The Admiral gives me insanely good head rubs!"

"O-Oh...the headrubs, yes..."

"Oooh!? Shigure, can you comment on this?! What're these mysterious 'headrubs' Yuudachi's speaking of?!"

"W-Well...the Admiral...he...he likes to...s-stroke our...our hair flaps..."

"He does!? Oooohhh, why doesn't he do that for me!? Stupid, stupid Admiral!"

"Holy crap, even Murasame's gettin' worked up over this..."

"Sh-Shigure-onee-chan, h-how...how do you get the Admiral to, um, s-stroke your hair...? P-Please, tell us...!"

"It's the hair flaps, man. It's gotta be the hair flaps."

"I agree."

"Whoaaaa!? Then, then does this mean - !?"

"What, Shiratsuyu-onee-san?"

"This can only mean one thing! ! !"

"O-One thing...?"

_**"Hair flaps are confirmed a sign of the second remodel!"**_

"But of course! Excellent observation, Shiratsuyu-onee-san! Everyone, after this, let us all go to the local hairstylist and ask to get hair flaps just like Shigure-onee-san and Yuudachi!"

"Yeah!"

"Sounds good."

"E-Eh!? Th-That has no basis at all! What are you guys even talking about!"

"Yeah! It's not like we _asked _to have hair flaps! We just came with 'em after we popped out of our remodels! Don't be so _jealous, _poi!"

"What did you say, Yuudachi? Don't be..._jealous?"_

"Eeeeeek! G-Give, give, give, give, pooooooooooi!"

"A-Anyways! Movin' on, next up, we've got Harusame! Harusame, in your opinion, what's the best part of base life? Tell the world, the whole world's listening!"

"Th-The w-w-whole w-world?! E-Eh...oh...uh, uh, uh...um...I...I..."

"H-Harusame-onee-san, don't faint right now! You're on air!"

"O-Oohhh...I-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry...um..."

"Remember, the best thing about base life."

"Y-Yes...right, right...um...I think...I think...um...m-my...my..."

"Your what, Harusame?"

"M-My...my f-f-family! Everyone, I'm - Th-That's the best part! Uuuu..."

"H-Harusame-onee-saaaaan...!"

"Er, ya guys, try not ta cry on the mic, yeah...?"

"C'mon, Kawakaze, how can ya say that when the rest of us're too busy going '_awwwww'_?"

"Well, for yer information, that's 'cause I ain't a mushy bitch, that's why..."

"Awww, it's okay, poor lil' Kawakaze, your sisters still love you. Especially Umikaze, I'm sure she knows how ta love you in just the right ways 'n places."

_"Shut the fuck up, you worthless piece 'a shit of a destroyer!"_

"Kawakaze..."

"Eeeek! I-I'm sorry, aneki! I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!"

"Okay, that was short 'n sweet. Next, Samidare! What's the best part of life here?"

"Me? Oh, well...um...I'd say being the secretary ship girl. The Admiral's office is such a nice place to be in. Plus, if you look out the window, you can see the whole sea and the rest of the base, and the sun comes in at just the right angle, and if you open up the windows, the breeze from the sea comes in, and...oh, it's just wonderful, it really is."

"But our listeners wanna know, since you've been the secretary ship girl out of us the most, how difficult it is being the secretary. Is it as hard as people think it is, or is there some kind of secret behind it?"

"S-Secret!? Th-There is no 'secret'...I simply enjoy working with the Admiral...it, well, it _is _tough work sometimes. The Admiral needs to fill out so many papers because he's always so busy, so sometimes I work with him to share his burden so he doesn't have to do it all by himself. But it is fun, really! The Admiral and I talk about many things while we work to pass the time. It's really fun."

"Oooohh...Samidare, you're really making me want to apply for the position now..."

"Murasame, you're gettin' real jealous, aren't'cha."

"Am I getting a deja vu, Suzukaze?"

"No, totally not, I totally didn't ask ya that same question like three minutes ago."

_"Last intermission, girls!"_

"Ah, we just got word from our producer that we're scheduled for our last break! Sit tight, when we come back, we'll wrap up the discussions and take some questions from the listeners! Thanks for tunin' into the Shiratsuyu Special!"

"For God's sake, Shiratsuyu-aneki, we're changin' that name the next time we do this."

"No, we're not."

"Yes, we are."

"You can't disrespect me, I'm the eldest here! Listen to your older sister like a good girl!"

"I'll show ya how a _real _good girl behav - _ow! _O-Okay, okay, okay, U-Umikaze-aneki, I'll stop, I'll stop! I - aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh..."

"...what the hell is Umikaze doin' to her?"

"Er...you...don't...want to know..."


	16. The Shiratsuyu-Class Special 3

"Hey, Shigure-Aneki."

"Hm?"

"What equipment pieces did'ja say ya had again? The ones that Admiral gave ya?"

"Oh...um, let's see...two 12.7cm Twin Gun Mount Model B Kai 2's, my Type 22, and my Type 13."

"...Shigure, you do realize that you can't carry four gear pieces, right? Your fourth slot's locked."

"E-Eh? Oh, you're right...but then why did Admiral tell me..."

"He forgot that Kantai Collection's a game. What a scrub."

"Wait, Kawakaze, why do you ask?"

"Low-key, I wanted ta gib 'em from ya so that I can use 'em for the upcomin' time trials...I can't let Suzu beat me."

"Ya bitch, ya know I can hear ya, right?"

"Ah, crap."

"Jus' 'cause I'm at the end 'a the goddamn table 'n jus' 'cause I'm the youngest..."

"Aw, jus' chill yer butt! It's jus' a game within a game, so don't get'cher panties all tied up!"

_"I'm gonna tie YOUR panties in a bunch on the goddamn laundry lines 'n make ya hang there 'til Houshou-san takes ya down tomorrow!"_

_"Okay girls, settle down, settle down! Last segment is live in ten!"_

"But...aren't Shigure-onee-chan and Yuudachi-onee-chan the strongest out of all of us?"

"Yes, but...Kawakaze and Suzukaze can catch up. Or at least that's what they think..."

"It ain't jus' what we _think_, they're only stronger 'cause they got higher levels!"

_"Alright, it's live!"_

"Alright, we're live with the final segment of the Shiratsuyu-Class Special! Last time we - "

"Again with the stupid fuckin'...agh, forget it..."

" - left off with Samidare's thoughts on life here at the Naval Base! Next up, we've got the beautiful snowy ship girl recently acquired from the last event, Umikaze! Umikaze, what're your thoughts about this base?"

"Oh, my thoughts? Um, well - it's - well, this...this is a bit embarrassing to say, but..."

"Oooh? An embarrassing thing? Even better, let the _whoooooole _world know your most passionate secrets, Umikaze! Come, come, don't be shy~!"

"Shiratsuyu-onee-san, you're starting to sound like a pervert."

"Wha? No, I would _never_..."

"Yes...yes indeed, you would never, after we all caught you groping Umikaze in the changing room outside the showers..."

"Goddamn it, Shigure!"

"I'm still very disappointed in you. Please remember that."

"Um...while that too was quite embarrassing, that...wasn't it..."

"Oh, right, yeah, speak, Umikaze! Speak!"

"It's...it's when...when the Admiral asked me to marry him..."

_**"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?"**_

"HE _**PROPOSED **_TO YAAAAAA!? ADMIRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL, YOU BASTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARD - "

"I feel as though I must take some very _drastic _actions tonight..."

"M-Murasame-onee-chan, y-you look s-scary with that big anchor in your hands..."

"He's supposed to marry _me _first! Admiral, you two-timing, scheming, fraudulent - "

_"GIRLS!"_

"A-Ahem! A-Anyway, please continue, Umikaze-san."

"Um...his proposal...it wasn't serious, he simply said it out of impulse because he said he loved my hair..."

"What a weirdo. Damned hair fetishists."

"I know, right. Fucker should jus' go explode somewhere. What does he think we are, heroines from some kinda eroge?"

"Well, Kankore _is _rated R-18 after all."

"So basically, what'cher sayin's that half the people who play this game are actually underage."

"Sssshhhhh, don't spoil DMM's trade secrets! They'll ban you!"

"S-So if the Admiral actually does marry you, does that mean he'll d-do you-know-what with you!?"

"What? What's 'you-know-what'?"

"Well, when he takes you into his room..."

"Turns off the lights..."

"Brings you to bed..."

_**"AND READS YOU A BEDTIME STORY!"**_

"Yeah, I love bedtime stories, poi!"

_**"SAVED, BOYS! FUCKING SAVED!"**_

"Yeah! Gimme some, Suzu!"

"Wow, you two get along really well, don't you."

"BFF's for life. Outside 'a time trials, 'a course."

"Speaking of which, moving on from Umikaze, next we have Yamakaze, but because she isn't even in the game yet, we'll have to skip her and go straight to our fiery redhead, Kawakaze! Kawakaze, what do _you _think is the best part about base life? _Other _than telling everyone you're the absolute greatest?"

"Uh, well, the best part's for me that I can two-vs-one against the Myoukou-Class, and I can prolly kick everyone's asses here. Except for Shigure-Aneki. She's the only one who can kick _my _ass. But really that's 'bout it."

"I just said not to talk about that."

"Too bad, I did. Seriously though, I didn't expect the food here ta be so great, y'know? I thought this was gonna be a bad rehash 'a the war from the old days, y'know, livin' off bad food 'n supplies. But it ain't that! We get good food, 'n the dorms are super comfy! Plus, the baths're great!"

"Not for you, they aren't."

"Huh? Suzu, whaddya mean? I wasn't bein' sarcastic, dafuq?"

"Don't lie, I always see you stealin' peeks at the other girls, especially when Murasame goes into the bath with ya."

"Oh my fuckin' - you jus' _had _ta bring that up, did'ja? For the record, my tits're bigger 'n yours, so you can go fuckin' eat a torpedo 'n shut right the fuck up!"

"Do I hear butthurt? _Do I hear butthurt?!"_

"Fuck you! Anyways, like I was sayin', the food's great, dorm's great, bath's great, everythin's great. Plus, the Admiral supplies us well 'n gives us the best equipment. Easy wins, easy life, ya feel me? Feels good bein' the best, man! Feels good, man!"

"Psh, yeah. Watch when Yuudachi kicks yer ass to the curb in the next time trials."

"Bullshit. Yuudachi-Aneki can't beat me."

"Hey, I so totally can, poi! I can prove it! The last time trials, I beat you, remember?"

"That's 'cause you were level 90 and I was only level 5! You were literally _three seconds faster! _Lemme repeat that: _THREE SECONDS FASTER! _With a goddamn _eighty-five level difference!"_

"Now you're just being nitpicky, Kawakaze! Kawakaze's a mean bully, poi!"

"N-Now, now, you two, please don't fight..."

"Don't worry, Harusame, we ain't fightin', we're jus' banterin'!"

"Yeah, speakn' 'a banter, your banter is fuckin' shit-tier. Get good, _scrub_."

"Why you lil - "

"Suzukaze, please!"

"Tch. Yer lucky Samidare's here, Kawakaze."

"Yeah. Oh wait, look at all the fucks I don't give...see, look, there they go...weeee..."

"Okay, if that's all that Kawakaze's got to say - "

"Oh, oh, wait, wait, one more thing! I like how everyone's so chill around here. If I wanna try my skill 'gainst other strong destroyers, 'gainst light cruisers, 'gainst heavy cruisers, 'gainst battleships, even, hell, there's always someone who's always up for a spar! I love it! Even if we both know I can't win, I still like the fact that everyone's willin' to help each other out, y'know? Help train up destroyers like me. I thought maybe people'd be all full'a 'emselves 'n not really give a shit 'bout us destroyers, but clearly that ain't the case. I like it."

"Great! So that was Kawakaze's take on the base, now finally let's move on to our very last member of the panel, Suzukaze! Suzukaze, what say you about life here in the naval base?"

"Well, believe it or not, I was one 'a the first ones outta all 'a us ta join this base. I was here even 'fore Shigure 'n Yuudachi came along. What everyone's said so far's cool 'n all, but I think the absolute best thing's that we all got each other now. We're fightin' all together now, fightin' a war we know we can win. This ain't gonna be like last time, so knowin' that as we sortie out 'n fight - it's really a great feeling."

"Ooooh, Suzukaze dropping the real talk? I like it."

"Not only that, but I think I'm speakin' for everyone here when I jus' think life in general is just fun here. Yeah, sure, you've all heard us banter 'n argue 'n talk shit a lot so far, but we're all sisters. When we get serious, we can do anythin'. It's totally awesome."

"Three outta ten, Suzu, too much mush, would not hear again."

"Shut the fuck up, Kawakaze, 'fore I give _you _a ten outta ten beatdown 'til yer runnin' off ta Umikaze cryin'."

"Psh. Talkin' big, are ya?"

"Maybe, but _you _won't be when yer cryin' like a lil' sum-bitch to Umikaze."

"Okay, okay, 'nough 'a that! So that brings us ta the end 'a our lil' live broadcast here, I wanna thank all our listeners for tuning into our first ever episode of the Shiratsuyu-Special! Our host for next time will be the Lucky Survivor herself, Shigure! Look forward to next week!"

"Bye~"

_"Okay, girls, mics off, you're off the air!"_

"Whew, finally we get ta blow this joint. I wonder if Irako-san's still out there makin' some more mizu youkan?"

"You jus' love mizu youkan, don't'cha."

"Mizu youkan _is _really good! I love the blueberry one!"

"Umikaze, wanna go get some 'n go to our room for some anime 'n chill?"

"I would love to~"

"H-Hey, don't leave me out!"

"We should all go together."

"Yeah! And we should watch One Punch Man, too! I heard from Yuubari-san that it's a great show!"

"Trust Yuubari-san ta know what's up with anime, huh?"

"Girls! Girls, you still need to hand the mics to me! Girls! Girls!? Oh, for the love of - "


	17. Firebirds 4

**A/N:**

**It's time to go back to writing some more serious one-shots. JennyTalia, I got you.**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"So? What did Tommy say 'bout the war in the Atlantic?" Phoenix calls. "Are the Royal Girls makin' any progress on their own?"

"They cleared out the Abyssals from Faroe Island just the other day, the day of my departure," Johnston calls back. Her Cherokee accent, while very subtle, makes her English sound exotic to the Japanese ship girls who hear it. "But they have taken heavy casualties. No fatalities, thankfully, but they will not be able to launch another offensive campaign for at least another week."

Johnston, with one of her modernized tomahawks in her right hand, throws it at Phoenix as though she is throwing an American football. The tomahawk hurtles through the air, the serrated blade sharp enough to cut the air itself, and Phoenix deftly catches it by the handle.

"Not for another week? Damn, that sucks," Phoenix groans, twirling Johnston's tomahawk around with her fingers. "Can't the Atlantic Fleet pitch in? What're they up to?"

"They are currently deployed to the Falkland Islands. Argentinian sources stated that Abyssals had taken over the Falkland Islands, and we think that the Abyssals are trying to establish a forward base there to launch campaigns against South American coastlines."

"Huh, that so." Phoenix hurls the tomahawk back at Johnston, and it darts straight for the latter's face, but Johnston, unflinching, simply lifts her hand up in front of her forehead and the handle of her war hatchet smacks hard into her palm so that she can close her fingers around it, catching it. "How many of us're down there? Who's there right now?"

"The First Atlantic Fleet is already there with Carrier Strike Group 12 - when I departed, they were already operational," Johnston informs.

"As in, they - "

"Yes."

"Ah, okay."

Johnston throws her tomahawk again, and Phoenix, instead of catching it normally, decides to get all fancy and plugs her index finger into one of the perforated holes along the back end of the hatchet blade perfectly, causing the weapon to swing around her finger like a swinging keychain.

"Shouldn't that be somethin' the Royal Girls would take care of, though? I mean, didn't they fight there, at the Falklands, before?" Phoenix wonders aloud.

"From what I heard, the naval committee contacted the Royal Navy in regards to it, but the Royal Navy declined. The European theatre is already occupied enough as it is," Johnston shrugs. "The French and the Germans are already stretched thin as it is. Had we not had so much Abyssal threats in the Pacific threatre, we would already be in European waters clearing them of hostiles."

Phoenix throws the tomahawk back again, and Johnston reaches out her finger and taps the bottom of the flipping handle to pop the weapon up into the air, then catches it on its way down.

"By the way, that tomahawk's feelin' good. Did you make that yourself?" Phoenix asks. She and Johnston are standing about thirty meters apart along the dock next to the water in the morning sun.

"Yes. I felt that I needed something else to supplement by firepower. The guns, they certainly have built them much better overall than the ones we used to use before, but given how close quarters we destroyers must fight - "

"And your habit 'a constantly gettin' up in the Abyssals' faces - "

"Yes, that too - I felt that I needed something more. A weapon that doesn't rely on ammunition, can be deployed immediately when I need it, and is lethal."

"Hence, tomahawk."

Johnston tosses her weapon up a bit like a pitcher tossing up a baseball just before winding up for a pitch, and she casually tosses it into the air so that the hatchet tumbles through the air in an arc. Phoenix catches it by the blade on purpose, taking hold of the handle with her right hand and glancing at her left palm. A large, clean cut is pressed into her hand, and blood is slowly oozing out.

"It's awesome, I can tell ya that much," Phoenix grins, looking at the hatchet blade, which is so sharp that it has none of Phoenix's blood on it.

"If you'd like, I can let you have one of mine," Johnston offers. "Try it once during a sortie. You are an aggressive light cruiser, judging by your flamethrowers. You can set the Abyssals on fire, and then cut them to pieces."

Grinning dubiously at the juicily bloody thoughts, Phoenix still shakes her head. "I'm good, juggling my flamethrowers and main guns is bad enough. Still, not gonna lie, havin' a straight melee loadout doesn't sound bad. Sounds fun, actually, to be honest." Phoenix lifts her hand to her mouth, licking some stray blood trickles off her hand before throwing the tomahawk back to its owner.

"I remember when I first starting using these, the Abyssals didn't expect it at all," Johnston smiles as she snatches her tomahawk out of the air. "A destroyer packing up her weapons and resorting to butchering them with hatchets? Nobody expected it. That's why it worked so well."

"So how about now?"

"They've wised up a little. They are trying to avoid me in close quarters combat now whenever they can, I've noticed."

"They're scared, brah. They scared."

"Indeed."

"H-Hawawaaaaa..."

The small squeal from one of the Japanese destroyers catches Phoenix's attention, and glancing to her left, she realizes that the Shiratsuyu-Class and the Akatsuki-Class destroyers are watching them play tomahawk catch with horrified amazement.

"Hm? Hey, girls, what's up?" Phoenix calls over in Japanese.

"A-Are you, like, playing _catch_ with that thing?!" Yuudachi cries out. She's trembling like a scared puppy, her eyes glued out of paralyzed fear to the hatchet spinning in Johnston's hand.

"Yeah! Wanna join?"

"N-No, poi!"

Phoenix bursts into laughter at Yuudachi's scared rejection. "Aw, it's fun! Once ya get over throwin' around the hatchet."

"L-Look at what it did to your _hand!" _Akatsuki bawls out, pointing a shaking finger at Phoenix's cut left palm. "That looks bad! W-We need to get you to the docks - "

"I'm fine, I'm fine!" Phoenix just keeps laughing at everyone's overreactions. "See, look!"

With her fire power, the American light cruiser pumps the fingers on her left hand twice and then sets her entire hand on fire. With the help of her own fire, Phoenix cauterizes her own wound, and after a few moments, she deactivates it, leaving the cut on her hand completely closed and charred.

"See? No biggie!" But when Phoenix looks up at the onlookers, they are all either cringing at the painful sight or trembling even harder, a sight Phoenix finds extremely amusing. "Aw, it ain't that bad! We've been through worse! Hibiki, c'mere! Wanna play some hanetsuki?"

"Hanetsuki?" Hibiki asks, a bit confused as she approaches Phoenix.

"Yeah! Here, watch..."

With her left hand again, Phoenix creates a condensed ball of fire, about the size of a tennis ball, and tosses it up into the air and starts juggling it with her feet, keeping it in the air. She kicks it up twice before kicking it over to Hibiki, who scrambles to keep it airborne.

"Th-This isn't hanetsuki, but - !" Hibiki grunts. She taps the fireball up a few times rapidly with the top of her foot, juggling it onto her knees, and then passes it back to Phoenix.

"Here, Johnston!" Phoenix yells as she kicks it over to the American destroyer. The fireball goes sailing through the air like a comet, its fire trail blazing behind it, briefly outshining the sun for a moment. Johnston, tracking its progress, properly grabs her hatchet handle and continues the chain combo, tapping the fireball up with a flat side of her tomahawk like she's flipping pancakes with a frying pan. After about ten or so taps, Johnston readjusts her grip on her handle like a tennis continental grip and smacks the fireball back over to Phoenix.

"I-Isn't that dangerous?" Hibiki asks hesitantly.

"You mean to me, or to everyone else?"

"Uhhh..."

Phoenix then kicks the small fireball out into the harbor waters. The ship girls watch as the fireball flies about a hundred twenty meters out into sea, then turns into a giant conflagration as soon as it touches the seawater. The Japanese destroyers watch with mouths agape as the flames burn and spread along the surface of the water. The American light cruiser, unsurprisingly, is cheering.

"That's how ya get a fire started!" Phoenix chuckles.

"U-Um, Phoenix-san...?" Shigure stammers, "if...if by some chance, that...that fireball touched the ground here, would it have...?"

"Yeah, it would'a exploded. Ka-boom!" Phoenix just keeps laughing almost obnoxiously.

"Hawawawawaaaaaa, scary, s-scarrrryyy...!" Inazuma is trembling behind Ikazuchi like a frightened hamster.

"Aw, I'm not scary! Here, lemme show ya!" Phoenix walks over to the Akatsuki-Class destroyers, with Hibiki trotting along behind her just in case. Upon seeing her approach, the Akatsuki and Ikazuchi both squeal and bolt for cover, leaving their youngest sister all by herself.

"S-Sorry, Inazuma-chan, b-but we have to sacrifice you!" Akatsuki screams as she runs away.

"We'll always remember youuuuuuuu - " Ikazuchi's voice gets cut off by a door shutting somewhere.

Inazuma, too scared to get herself to run away, trips over her own feet as she tries to back away and looks up with teary eyes as Phoenix stands over her.

"Uuuuu..." she assumes a defensive stance, pulling her head down with her hands. Still chuckling, Phoenix kneels down, scoops up the destroyer, and lifts her up so that Inazuma now sits on her shoulders.

"See? Not scary, not scary~" Phoenix sings. "It's nice 'n warm, ain't it?"

Inazuma sniffles. It _is _warm, due to Phoenix's enhanced body heat from her latent fire conduits underneath her skin, but she's still a bit traumatized by Phoenix's approach.

"Oh, that looks fun..." Shiratsuyu thinks aloud, watching Inazuma get a free ride on Phoenix's shoulders as Johnston offers Hibiki the same treatment, which Hibiki accepts.

"No, don't, Shiratsuyu-nee-chan! Phoenix, she's - she's going to eat you alive, poi!" Yuudachi says in a scared voice.

"No, she's not..." Shiratsuyu rolls her eyes. "You're just scared of her because you got too close to her fire during one of our sorties."

_"She's gonna eat you, poi!"_

"Who is?"

Yuudachi practically screams out loud when she hears Phoenix's curious voice pop right behind her ears. Phoenix just doubles over laughing as Yuudachi scampers behind Shigure, her hair flaps lowered like dog ears and whimpering nonsensically. Even Johnston, who usually is seen with a stoic expression on her face, breaks her usual facade to reveal a subtle grin of amusement.

"Scary birdie! Scary birdie gonna get'cha, gonna get'cha!" Phoenix is having too much fun teasing Yuudachi, bouncing her face side to side in front of the hapless Shigure and making Yuudachi dance back and forth to try to avoid Phoenix's sizzling gaze.

"E-Erm, Phoenix-san, please...it would be nice if you could stop..." Shigure murmurs nervously. She doesn't really like Phoenix all too much herself.

"Okay, okay, I'll stop, I'll stop..." Phoenix relents. "By the way, when's training starting today? I'm gettin' bored here! Let's do somethin' already, yeah?"

"We're scheduled for a new arrival. Did you perhaps forget, Phoenix?" Johnston reminds her.

"Oh, right, the Admiral here mentioned something about that. Who is it again? It wasn't another one 'a us, right?"

"No, it was another Japanese ship girl being transferred here."

"Really? What's takin' her so long, then? Where is she?"

Johnston's eyes roll up in thought as she tries to remember. Then, she turns around and points down the harbor.

"Is that her?"

The ship girls peer down the harbor. Walking towards them now is a lone ship girl, and judging by her attire, she indeed appears to be Japanese.

"Oh!" Murasame calls out excitedly. "It's Houshou-san!"


	18. Escort Business

**A/N:**

**I looked through the review sections to see whose requests I could do. I looked at Armarda's and decided it could be interesting to write more about American ship girls, particularly the carriers.**

**I know that most people depict carrier ship girls as wielding mainly bows of some kind. However, while I know that there's nothing that says that Americans aren't known for archery too, for me personally, it's more fitting for a carrier to wield something ****_else_****...**

**In other words, I'll be taking some artistic licenses in this chapter. A few..._big _artistic licenses. So much so that perhaps jeanex wouldn't really consider them exactly his/her own. But it's alright - this's just a fanfiction, after all.  
**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

"Abyssal planes, spotted eleven o' clock high!"

In a classified location in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, a small seaborne convoy sails for Australia. The convoy itself consists of two freighters and an oil tanker, but its escorts consist of the U.S.S. _Columbia _(SSN-771), the U.S.S. _Princeton_ (CG-59), the U.S.S. _Bunker Hill _(CG-52), the U.S.S. _Chafee _(DDG-90), and the U.S.S. _Chung-Hoon _(DDG-93). With the submarine sailing slightly ahead of the formation and the rest of the American warships assuming a diamond formation to protect their assigned convoy, this seems like an unnecessarily large military escort for a few cargo transport vessels that don't look like they're carrying anything out of the ordinary for Pacific transporters. However, regardless of their contents, Abyssal presence is heavy in this area - for a few months Abyssal presence has infested this area while the world's navies are busy quarantining and eliminating portions of the sea's Abyssal presences a batch at a time.

Off the deck of the lead left destroyer, _Chaffee,_ boost three young ladies as the sailors on deck hastily dash aside to let them through and snap to strict salutes as they run past.

"Remember, Mahan, Maury, no glitches! I'll call 'em, you brawl 'em!"

"Don't worry, I'll get kinetic in this goddamn AO!"

"I've got your six!"

In the midst of sirens and alarms warning the small fleet of incoming Abyssal presence, the three elite American ship girls push off the tip of their destroyer's bow, and with their final steps, their cells release compressed energy to propel all three of them forward in powerful boosts that send them flying some two hundred meters forward, allowing them to remain airborne for a few seconds before their feet slam against the calm, sunny waves of the Pacific. Bright blue water splashes up as three pairs of boots crush the water's surface, and two of those pairs immediately boost forward a second time as soon as they make contact with the water.

The ship girl left behind, U.S.S. Enterprise, official designation CV-6, pulls down her naval peaked hat as she reaches behind her back and pulls a large weapon that is strapped there. Normally, the carrier girls of the world navies traditionally use bows and arrows as their mediums of launching planes. However, the American carriers have stepped up the ante a little bit, staying true to American militarism.

Enterprise carries the XM-6 Bazooka. Developed specifically to be wielded by Enterprise, hence the "6" designation, the Bazooka is the first and only one of its kind. Consequently, Enterprise is currently the only carrier in the world to use a rocket launcher as her medium of launching planes. It's basically as tall as her, and bandoliers of 60mm rocketheads are strapped around her chest and stomach, because conventional load bearing vests aren't meant to accommodate _rockets_.

Easily carrying her twenty-five-pound rocket launcher with just one frail-looking arm, Enterprise deploys the flip-up sights on her massive 160mm-long Bazooka and shoulders it to point it up at the air at the direction of the spotted Abyssal scout planes. Enterprise's sharp ruby eyes twist their multi-layered pupils about like telescope lens, allowing the carrier to zoom in to have perfect vision over the enemy recon planes, and the advanced targeting modules on the computerized flip-up sights of her Bazooka, scanning the scout planes, immediately list enemy information on these spotted planes, everything from plane type to estimated flight time. The sights can even estimate for Enterprise how much fuel the planes have, should that level of detailed information somehow come into handy in the future.

"CV-6 to DDG-90, enemy scout planes are going to be RTB! How copy?" Enterprise calls, her finger tapping her launcher trigger. She knows what the answer will be.

_"Eliminate them."_

Enterprise's Bazooka screams with artillery exhaust blasting behind her as backdraft, and a 60mm rocket flies through the air at a diagonal trajectory. Having locked on to one of the Abyssal scout planes, the live warhead seeks its target and smashes into it, detonating itself and swallowing up all Abyssal planes into a large cloud of black smoke before they have a chance to break formation and fly apart to avoid the missile hit. The battered ruins of the enemy scout planes fall out of the sky and drop down to the ocean below.

"DD-364 outcalling! No Abyssal fleet presence detected!" the American ship girl destroyer, U.S.S. Mahan, reports. "It's either an air attack or a submarine attack! CV-6, we need sonar support, our ships can't detect Abyssal submarines!"

"CV-6 copies."

Pulling a rocket straight off her bandoliers, Enterprise taps the front of the electronic rocket with her left thumb, manually configuring it to be a sonar detection warhead before pulling her rocket launcher down and directly inserting the warhead into the muzzle of her Bazooka. The Bazooka roars again with another explosion, and the backdraft, directed straight down, blasts the war apart from beneath the carrier's feet. Normally backdraft like this would be either very harmful or even downright fatal to any normal soldier, but for a ship girl, such damage is not even negligible; it's ticklish.

The sonar detection rocket detonates some seventy-five meters in the air, and like the energy waves of an EMP bomb, the sonar detection rocket explodes into several nebulous rings of blue energy that spread out like the ripples of water.

"Sonar detection is up! You're right, 364, it's a submarine attack!" Enterprise reports, her own personal on-board sonar, aided with the powerful sonar detection waves of her most recently fired warhead, pinpoints exactly the positions of the inbound enemy submarines. "They're launching torpedoes! Regroup and defend the convoy! Intercept all torpedoes!"

The two destroyers, Mahan and U.S.S. Maury, DD-401, boost back to Enterprise and then past her as they spread out to intercept the launched enemy torpedoes that they can track the progress of through their sensors. _Chafee _and _Bunker Hill_, the ships that the enemy torpedoes are targeting, respond by launching their own counter-torpedoes, and the ship girls can see the shadowy silhouettes of the torpedoes sailing out to meet their adversaries in underwater battle.

"Torpedoes engaging!" Maury keeps a keen eye on her sensors to watch the torpedoes slam into each other to neutralize one another, watching for any stray Abyssal torpedoes that may end up punching through. Sure enough, a few do, so she reacts accordingly. "364, take the ones at our twelve! I'll get the ones at our tens!"

"Roger!"

Maury boosts herself to intercept the incoming torpedoes that are inbound for _Bunker Hill_. On her right arm is a a knobbed circular shield with the emblem of the American eagle on it, but also attached underneath the shield, built into the arm braces that secure the shield to Maury's right arm, is a an autoloading quadruple 21-inch torpedo launcher. Maury points this arm-mounted torpedo launcher down at the sea, and calculating the speed of the incoming torpedoes and taking the explosive data of her own munitions into account, Maury fires exactly one torpedo as the first of the trio of enemy torpedoes reaches within one hundred and twenty meters of her. Her lone torpedo plunges into the water and, set on a timed fuse that Maury electronically has placed, detonates underwater right over the closely-packed group of Abyssal torpedoes, detonating all of them. By this time the American destroyer herself is safely removed from the scene, as she has returned to her original post immediately after deploying her lone torpedo, and a spectacular pillar of water caused by the combined explosive power of all those torpedoes is erected for a few moments. In fact, two more of these pillars of water shoot up into the air, albeit at different times, as Mahan and Enterprise successfully intercept and destroy the torpedoes headed their way.

"We're not done," Enterprise warns to the entire fleet, "enemy submarines are still inbound. No torpedoes, though."

"They want a melee," Maury grins devilishly. "Well, they chose the exact _wrong _convoy to pick a fistfight with. Permission to engage first?"

"Granted," Enterprise nods. "Don't be reckless, we'll provide support in one mike."

"What about you? Will you be fine for now?" Mahan asks, pointing at Enterprise's Bazooka.

"If they so wish a fight, I will give it to them. I will be collecting my usual fee, though," Enterprise grins as she begins loading rocket after rocket from her bandoliers into her Bazooka, and Mahan boosts off after Maury, who is about to make contact with the Abyssal submarines.

"Contact!" Maury reports as her minimap flashes with the first few red dots of Abyssal submarines. "Another torpedo wave inbound, watch it, 364!"

Boosting aside to dodge the proximity-based enemy torpedoes, Maury sidesteps the attacks. In her left hand, she has been carrying an American flag whose stand is taller than Maury herself, but it is made out of steel, not wood. Returning fire with her own torpedoes, emptying her quad launcher, Maury then runs straight after her own torpedoes to close the distance between her and the Abyssal submarines trying to draw near to the convoy to hopefully torpedo it at an easier distance. Because her sensors indicate that these submarines are making the grave mistake of not staying safe deep beneath the surface, Maury takes advantage of this and plunges her flagpole deep into the water, then pushing through the water and back out of it like she's trying to shovel out snow. But only this isn't snow she's shoveling out of the ocean, but instead a huge quantity of seawater and three Abyssal Ka-Class submarines, who go flying into the air helplessly. Behind Maury, a several shots detonate, and Mahan shoots them all in the air with her rapid fire 5-inch turret. While Mahan sinks the submarines that Maury has shoveled out with her mysteriously powerful flag, Maury raises her right hand into the air like she's about to do a fistpump, then drops a knee down to the water's surface and pounds the surface of the sea with the face of her shield. The knob turns as soon as the shield hits the water, and Maury generates a shockwave of violent energy that ruptures the water's surface, thus popping out all the submarines from the ocean like she's done with her flag, only it reveals more enemies but doesn't send them flying into the air as high as her flag did. And this time, instead of Mahan shooting them with her 5-inch gun, Enterprise quick-aims her Bazooka without bothering to let it lock on and pulls the trigger multiple times, her rocket launcher bobbing up and down with each successive launched rocket.

Even as the flying submarines are being torn to pieces in the air from Enterprise's launched warheads, the American carrier boosts forward herself to join Maury in the fray.

"Finish it, Enterprise!" Maury, grinning, reaches out with a fist as she backs up to let Enterprise do the rest. The carrier, tapping knuckles with Maury, skids to a stop on the water, points her Bazooka straight down, and then starts to unload the rest of her Bazooka's stored rockets, splashing herself over and over with water that gets kicked up from her own munitions. Having set all of the rest of her rockets to be auto-seeking depth charges, Enterprise empties her XM-6 and watches her sensors as the Abyssal submarines, not knowing what these strange rockets are doing tracking them even while underwater, flee the scene en masse, retreating from the site of the convoy. Enterprise wipes the seawater splashed onto her face off with her left sleeve and turns around to sail back to the convoy.

"Good work out there," she gives both Mahan and Maury pats on the back.

"Man, what we'd do without your Bazooka," Maury just laughs. "That's a real lifesaver, ain't it?"

Enterprise smiles before raising a pair of fingers and snapping. Right on cue, some two hundred meters behind them, a half dozen more pillars of seawater blast up into the sky, and the soundwaves of the explosions rumble past them shortly after.

"It sure is a lifesaver."


	19. Reincarnation

**A/N:**

**Now that Kadokawa's giving some love to the Americans (I thought I'd never see the day), I will write a story on Iowa in the next entry. But for now, this is for Pikaru-kun. You did say I could choose the genre, so you can probably guess what I'm about to write.  
**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

I like sitting here every evening, on this small knoll near the base.

It's just a quick six or seven minute walk from the base dorms. I can come here whenever I want. Well, almost. We have to get up early every day for drilling, training, practice, expeditions, and sorties...whatever the Admiral needs us to do for the day. So I can't come out here when it's dark, because of curfew. We always need lots of rest, after all, as ship girls.

This is like my little secret spot in the base. It's such a perfect spot for a little picnic. There's a little grass here that grows really well and has the greenest green color you'll ever see that's so comfortable to sit on. It's the kind of grass that you can lie on and fall asleep on within seconds. I've tried it myself, and it works every time. It's so relaxing to take a nap here. It's also got such a great view; you can see the entire front of the base that's next to the sea, near the piers and the docks, including the Admiral's office. But the view of the sea is by far the best part, because the local terrain makes it so that this spot is a small overlook that hangs above the docks and out into the ocean. On sunny days, it's such a wonderful view - the blueness of the sky and the sea is so entrancing that I feel like I'm being slowly pulled into them as I'm looking out to them. And with a little bit of sea breeze draping my hair behind my neck and tickling the backs of my ears, I could probably sit here forever, watching the sky and the sea. I suppose it isn't too surprising that I would be perfectly content if the rest of the days in my life were to be spent sitting here, gazing into the warm, comfortable panorama, with the sunlight pressing gently against my cheeks and healing my soul.

Because this is my favorite spot in the base, I try to come here whenever I can. It's like my little retreat, my little oasis that I know I can always return to for a little bit of minor rehabilitation from the stress and the tedious work and training throughout the day. It's the greatest feeling in the world when we return from an expedition or a sortie and I can sneak past the Admiral and Ooyodo-san (who would yell at me to go dock to repair my injuries if they caught me) and come here. There was one time when I did do just that, and I managed to arrive here just in time to see the sun set, and the view was nothing short of amazing. I loved the view, and even though it wasn't my first time seeing the sunset, for some reason I just remember that day's sunset the most. Maybe it was because I was tired, and I was so grateful and happy to have come in time to see it. The nap that I took right there that evening was the best nap I ever took; I fell asleep as soon as the back of my head rested against the soft grass, and I remember the blankets of wind burying me in their coolness. If only I could heal my wounds from sleeping in this place, with the soothing ointments known as sunlight and wind. Then I wouldn't have any need for the docks...but I guess that's not really how it works, hee hee~

I do remember that after waking up from that nap, I suddenly found myself back in my dorm, in my bed, in a clean uniform. It didn't seem like anyone brought me back, so I think I might've just walked back when I was really tired, so I probably can't remember.

Now that I think about it, I don't ever think I've ever told anyone else about this place. It's like a naughty little secret I have. I only stumbled upon this place by pure chance because back when I was first posted to this base, I decided to go exploring around the base's facilities. Those were the days when it was only me, Fubuki-chan, the Admiral, and Yuudachi-chan. Those were fun days, but there were lots of times when Fubuki-chan was busy doing her duties as secretary ship girl, and Yuudachi-chan was sleeping because she loves sleeping in. So to pass those times by myself, I would explore, and I found this spot. It feels a little exciting to know that I have a secret place like this all to myself that nobody else knows.

But nowadays, now that our fleet has been growing bigger and bigger, I've been starting to grow feelings of guilt that I'm not sharing this place as I should. Now that my sisters have joined us here in the base, I always feel torn between spending time with them and spending time by myself here in this place. Besides, like anything else in life, enjoying myself alone here in this little spot of mine has been growing...a little stale, admittedly. The enjoyment isn't anywhere near as much as it was before because I know the feeling I get when I look out at the sea here very well already, but at the same time I feel bad because I've developed a bit of an emotional attachment to this place. It's like the grass here and the ocean speak out to me whenever I come, welcoming me like they're my friends too. Maybe it's time that I stop keeping this a secret all to myself. After all, that's just being selfish, isn't it? And as the lead ship of my class, I always need to try to set a good example for my sisters. So now, I do think that I will one day bring all of my sisters here and maybe even have a picnic here together. While I'll definitely be a little disappointed that I won't have this little gem all to myself anymore, I do recognize that I've enjoyed this place for myself enough. It's time to share the happiness I've cherished with everyone at base.

Hm? A rustling behind me? That's strange, I don't think I've ever seen any animals here before...

...oh no, wait, those are...those are footsteps. Uh oh, did I get found out? Who is that, anyway?

"Is it here, Admiral?"

Eh?

Kisaragi-chan? Satsuki-chan? Ki -

Wait a minute, why is everyone here? H-How did you all find out about this place?

"Yeah, it's here. This used to be the spot where Mutsuki always hung out at whenever she wanted to relax or just be by herself. I could see her from my office."

Huh? Why is no one...talking to me?

Hello? Can anyone hear me? Kisaragi-chan? Admiral? Mochizuki-chan? Please, anyone? This - this isn't funny...

...why does everyone look so sad? Did something happen?

"I should have told her when I had the chance. I thought giving her a second remodel was sufficient enough to convey the message, but now I know it clearly wasn't enough."

Admiral? What are you talking about? You never gave me a second remodel...

...he's putting a little crescent patch in front of a little bunch of red carnations next to me. It looks very worn and smudgy...

I've...never seen those flowers grow here. Since when did they...?

"I know you girls - not just you girls, but everyone else at base - are all working towards getting ones of your own, but...I hope you all can understand and forgive me if I put the first one here."

"Not at all, Admiral. Please..."

I watch the Admiral as it pulls out a small black case from inside his uniform coat pocket and put it next to the yellow crescent patch. It looks really expensive...

The Admiral stands back up. I've never seen him with that kind of expression on his face. It's like he's trying very hard not to cry. Pulling his peaked hat over his eyes, he murmurs,

"...I'm sorry, Mutsuki. It's...it's about time that I moved on too. All of your sisters have. I can't be their Admiral if I can't at least be enough of a man to do the same. Just know that while I loved the whole fleet, it was you I loved the most. I just didn't expect to lose you so...so quickly. And for that, I'll always have to live with that. Please forgive me, Mutsuki..."

This doesn't feel like a joke, but I don't want to believe it. I lunge my hand out at the Admiral's. I'm here, I'm right here; there's nowhere else you need to look at. Those words - I want you to say those words to me, Admiral! I -

My hand just goes right through his. At that moment, the Admiral turns around and slowly walks away, and my sisters, one by one, after giving their final glances at the carnations behind me, also follow him.

I...I guess I wasn't...supposed to hear those words...after all...


	20. An Unlikely Patriot

**A/N:**

**Just a little real talk here, not too much: as some of you may already know, I frequently lurk image board sites, mainly Danbooru, for Kantai fanart and webcomics. With the release of Kashima and more recently Iowa, I see that lots of people have been pretty hype about these two for quite some time, but I have to say I personally don't understand said hype. For some reason, those two just don't appeal to me, other than the fact that Iowa herself is American, and Kadokawa is now moving to include ship girls of differing nationalities.**

**Speaking of Iowa, here's a little story about her. Be warned, in my effort to make Iowa sound genuinely American in the 40's, the dialogue might come off as offensive. One of the critiques of a few of my more well-known stories of this collection, "I Know Why the Caged Crane Sings", was that the narrator used too much modern profanity to come off as genuinely WW-II-ish, so this is an attempt to rectify that. This story is not meant to be derogatory towards anyone; I'm just trying to make this little story sound as realistic as possible, but apologies in advance if there is any offense taken.  
**

**-Akyuu no Joshu**

* * *

It's December 7, 1945. Four years since the Japs hit us.

I remember when I was under construction. The construction team, especially the head developers, were hard pressed to get me completed as soon as possible. I'm not too sure when it was that I exactly gained consciousness. See, ship gals like me, we aren't born. We look human, act human...but we were all built from some kind of...laboratory, or some other fancy word that scientists like to use. But I spent my time in construction inside of a glass chamber somewhere, unable to see, unable to move. But my hearing had been developed first, so I was able to hear. I think my construction team didn't realize that I could do so, because all I heard, everything I heard was about the war.

About how we were losing the war.

Ship gals aren't human. If there was anyone who tried to argue for that, for the fact that we were human, I'd laugh him off to the next state over. Saying ship gals are like human beings is like saying gophers and prairie dogs are the same. It's absurd, is what it is. There might be a whole lot of biological explanations that might prove that there a lot connections that we share, but in the end, in my opinion, the reason why I can't be called a human is because I don't die when I get shot by a bullet in the head. I've seen a lot of good men die out there in the field. North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, England...and now Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angeles...

...now Des Moines.

By the time I was constructed and commissioned, I already knew the state of the war; my admirals and field commanders didn't have to drill it into my head. Thanks to the conversations of my construction crew and the lead developers and scientists in charge of it, I was mentally already equipped to deal with the situation at hand, when I first stepped out to sea on August 27th, 1942. London was nearly wiped off the map, and the rest of England was on the brink. North Africa was completely under the control of the Nazis and the Italians, and the Nazis themselves controlled all of continental Europe. Back then, at least the Ruskies were still powerful enough to stop the Nazis from marching right through their front door. My first task was to join the rest of the American naval personnel barely holding the line on the beachheads of southern Britain; my objective was to prevent the Nazis from gaining a foothold there. At the time, I didn't even know that the Japs had crushed our fleet at Midway with their carriers, and how they were steaming right for us with the Hawaiian islands as their first priority.

It's never a good feeling to enter the fight thinking you've already lost. Because then, you forget about what you're really fighting for. From what I hear from the grizzled veterans who have been fighting for all this time because God's been one cruel sonuvabitch, we entered the war thinking we were fighting to keep the evil Nazis and the evil Japs at bay. We were fighting to keep the world a safe place and keep it free from oppression and aggressive imperialism. We were fighting because we thought we were the good guys.

We still are the good guys. I still believe in that, with all of my heart. The only problem is that we've all seemed to forget that.

Because now, those of us who're still left to fight - those of us who still _can _fight - we're not fighting for a noble or higher cause anymore. We're not fighting to keep the world a safe place from the evil bad guys. We're fighting to stay alive. We're fighting because if we don't fight, we'll all die. We're fighting because we don't have a goddamn choice. We've stopped going into the fight thinking there might still be a chance we'd win. We just hope we don't lose too many to the point where we can't fight the next day when we fight now.

I was toted as America's greatest hope. The latter half of 1942 was the point of no return in the war. The Allies, as we were called, were beginning to lose traction, while the Axis, our enemies, were finally beginning to break through and turn the tide. I was the so-called "secret weapon" at the time of my launching. I was the one who would help the other gals in the fleet fend off the Germans from the shores of London and help the British break out and begin a possible counterattack into Germany. Little did we know they would send their own fleet, freshly transferred from the Russian front, to finish their campaign against England. After we lost London, the feelings of hope and anticipation that surrounded my arrival were already exhausted. Soldiers, even the other gals - after England went dark and we evacuated what remained of the Royal Forces, the Royal Fleet, and the British Royal Family out of the country, their faces changed from looks of relief to looks of disappointment and hatred. They genuinely believed in me, the hope that I had the power to put the chips of the war onto our side of the betting table after two years' worth of defeat and retreats. I believed in myself, too, but...somehow, I don't think one battleship by herself could have held off a German fleet that outnumbered us three to one, no matter how powerful I was. Their faces stayed the same for about a year before they started returning to normal.

England was my first campaign, and it ended in a total tactical failure and loss. By the summer of 1943, Great Britain was completely and firmly under Nazi control. Our next campaign was North Africa - back then, we had reports coming in that suggested that the Axis forces in North Africa were beginning to grow lax, so we decided to try our hand at breaking through their defenses in a three-pronged assault. I led the operation against Casablanca with the help of a few of the Royal Gals and ended up succeeding with heavy losses, but the other two parts of the assault failed and had to retreat. Within weeks, our weak hold on the town was broken when the German fleet arrived. It was that loss of Casablanca that created the constant joke that the rest of our military would make about the Navy. "When the German gals come a-firin', the showgals go a-runnin'". For about another two months, the gals and I had to endure that.

My sister, New Jersey, who had been deployed just barely in time to join me in the Casablanca operations, broke first. She punched General Eisenhower's nose in when he made a comment about how "the showgals of the Navy don't seem to be gettin' anything done". Consequently, she got scrapped, about three weeks after she'd first been deployed. Apparently there's no room for mutiny in the Navy.

By the end of 1943, the Ruskies went dark. All communications were suddenly cut, and for about a full year after that, we had no idea what the Ruskies were up to, what was happening to them. All we knew was that they had suddenly given up the eastern front, allowing the Nazis to march straight into Stalingrad for free and take it with ease. With that, it was believed Europe was beyond saving. With the Ruskies, there might've still been a chance. Without them, don't even think about it. It was by this point that we were officially all alone. It was North America against the world, for soon after Russia went dark, Mexico entered the war on the side of the Axis. The British Royal Family, operating temporarily out of Canada, ensured that Canada wouldn't turn against us too, but that was only a small consolation, because our forces in Hawaii, those magnificent bastards, they managed to keep the hands of the Japs off those islands for all that time until then. Oklahoma, West Virginia, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Maryland, and everyone else there - their last Morse code message was "Hawaii will never be the Japs' as long as we're still afloat". Seeing that Hawaii was then used as the Japs' forward base for their campaign against the West Coast, I think it's safe to say we knew what happened to them.

Ever since 1944, we had been fighting to stop the Japs from getting a foothold on the West Coast. Some Jap detachments even tried coming up from the south through Mexico, with the help of the Mexican army, but our codebreakers managed to decode their radio transmissions just in time for us to figure out their plans down there, and thankfully they never tried that tactic ever again. But we were fighting a losing fight, and we all knew it. With our navy divided, half on the West Coast and half on the East coast, we could not defend either coast and were only delaying the inevitable. The brassheads were too patriotic; the last time we had ever conceded ground to a foreign country was to England, back in the war of 1812. They were proud, too proud. They thought by God's grace and might we could hold both fronts, so help us God. We couldn't. When it was clear that the Japs, with their back-to-back victories in San Francisco and Los Angeles, our two biggest cities on the West Coast, would consolidate their gains and exert control over the coast, we were pulled out and assigned to the East Coast instead so that we wouldn't end up losing _both _coasts.

Then, in earlier this year, in April, I was personally escorting President Roosevelt at the Little White House, his own personal little retreat where he once came for treatment for his polio. I had met the President for the first time on the day of my launching in 1942. Then, I didn't think so much of him. I certainly remember not feeling all too impressed. But when I was pulled from the front lines to help escort the President for a few days as he resided in his retreat home to rest, we became friends, as good as we could have become with only a few days. I came to learn that he was not unlike me; a man charged with the responsibility of keeping his nation safe from the forces of evil foreign powers and was doing everything he could to do just that, but because we were starting to become invaded, the rest of the country was overlooking all of his work and tarnishing his name. There was even talk of impeaching him because he was not, according to popular belief of the country, doing his job right. The nation didn't need an incompetent president who couldn't even keep the Japs and the Jerries at bay. He said that he knew what I was going through; he'd been reading the reports from the Navy and had a few of his aides report to him about the situation of us ship gals.

"We need to keep standing strong in the face of adversity," he told me. "So that one day, you can visit the state you've been named for, and I can give another one of my Fireside Chats. I miss those, Iowa. Maybe one day in the future I can have you beside me for one of them. You know, like a guest. I hear the radio shows these days are having special guests."

That was the last thing he ever said to me, because two hours later, he was dead. The doctors' autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a cerebral hemorrhage, but I was immediately accused of assassinating the president, because I was the only one who was at the Little White House at the time of his death. The country, which had been so adamant about getting Roosevelt off the presidency, now clamored for a scapegoat, and the Navy found one in me to appease them. Without even a court martial, I was instantly put on death row. Every day for about two weeks following my imprisonment, the guards threw the daily newspapers into my holding cell, and each of them was a different variation on the same theme of the whore of a showgal who swindled the president to death. For eight months, I was kept in solitary confinement somewhere, awaiting my eventual scrapping. Unfortunately, it never came.

Exactly twenty hours ago, I was released from death row. Without my presence and power, our forces on the western front could not hold the tide of the Japs back, with their own entire fleet of ship gals blazing trails across the land wherever they tread, and during my eight months of imprisonment, they made it all the way to my own home state of Iowa. Des Moines is the last stronghold of the American Midwest. If we lose Des Moines, we lose Iowa, and we lose the Midwest. And if we lose the Midwest, the Great Lakes will be vulnerable, and Canada will be at stake.

I've been ordered to lead the defense against the Japs at Des Moines. I have four battalions of four thousand men each, and they've already turned the city into the trenches of the previous war, like it's prairie season all over again. The Navy has denied my requests to bring in any of the gals because they're too busy dying to the Jerries trying to take New York City. I'm on my own, and in three hours, according to our codebreakers, the Japs'll attack the city.

This wasn't exactly how I imagined seeing my home state would go, but at least I've been able to see it at all. It's really all that I could ask as a ship gal. I'm going to fight and die right here in my own home state, in the capital city. Since I know that this battle is hopeless, and that the outcome has already been decided, being able to die here is truly a wish granted by God.

Even a whore of a showgal like me can die a patriot. They'll never take that freedom away from me.

And when I die, I can hope that I can be constructed again, somewhere else. A place where the war could've turned out better for all of us...


End file.
